DREAMSCAPE
Nov 2023, Total Arts at Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
Dreamscape is a sensory journey that traverses the space between reality and dreams, waking life and the subconscious, the enduring and the irretrievably lost. The collective collaborated to establish an enclosed space, signaling a departure from the outside world as one crosses the threshold into a new, dream-like realm. Inside, multidisciplinary, site-specific works by Shaqayeq and Hind invite introspection, reconnecting us with our origins and our inherent ties to the land.
Much like the layer of separation from reality experienced during a dream, light, sound, textural, and visual elements melt into one another distorting perception and inducing a sense of amnesia, evoking the loss of the land.
Migrating Garden
Sep 2023, NADA House 2023, Governors Island, New York, USA
signs and symbols is delighted to present Migrating Garden, a site-specific installation by Shaqayeq Arabi for NADA House 2023. The installation comprises suspended sculptures that, together, compose a dynamic landscape in the air, responding to wind or the movement of visitors. Made of various organic and manmade materials, such as local twigs and mesh, the installation considers the shifting relationships and tensions between fragility and resilience, structure and flexibility, nature and existence.
Arabi's large-scale and immersive environments typically combine found objects with natural elements, including metal mesh, wire, paper, film, glue, twigs, plants, wood, and paint. Loosely held together or freely hanging, the individual components perform a tenuous balancing act, seeking an equilibrium between adaptation and stability. The natural materials in her work have a special resonance for the artist for their ability to bend yet resist external forces; an Iranian artist based between Dubai, Tehran, and New York, Arabi's installations can also be seen as a metaphor for the precarity of living in the Middle East. Through her work, Arabi not only accepts but embraces the conditions in which she lives, finding inspiration in images of resilience in nature.
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The Sea Was Far Away And The Sky Further
March 2022, Farjam Foundation, Dubai, UAE
curated by Camelia Esmaili
Nature is an efficient system of moving energy around, via predation, symbiosis, death, and transformation without any preconceptions. The Sea Was Far Away And The Sky Further explores the flow of life as energy, continually knotting and unknotting, from flow to matter and back to flow in an immense wave of distinguishable forms, always and everywhere, simultaneously. It's a state of imbalance constantly moving toward rebalancing, reaching a tender moment of fragile equilibrium, then passing, moving on.
And There Were Gardens.......
Jan 2020, Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The installation is a presentation of a landscape with actual fragments from the artist’s immediate environment and references to her imaginary garden, a vision of a dream, a fragment.
Dancing on Stilts
March 2020, Signs and Symbols, New York, USA
Dancing on Stilts & traversing the soggy ground
the blue sky is in the faraway horizon
and the memories of that fertile land is running in my veins.
- Shaqayeq Arabi
Signs and Symbols is pleased to present Dancing on Stilts, a solo exhibition by artist Shaqayeq Arabi. The exhibition features a site-specific installation composed of found objects and natural, symbolic material, combining sculpture with painterly elements to allude to shifting relationships between representation and abstraction, memory and materiality, structure and sensation. Read more...
Fragments, notes & lines
November 2018, Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
Shaqayeq Arabi’s installations investigate the fragmentary nature of memory and its relationship to actual objects in order to manipulate the understanding of our physical spaces. By combining sculpture with painterly qualities, her work points to shifting relationships between representation, abstraction and materiality. The exhibition encompasses drawings, paintings and sculptures by three artists: Fereydoun Ave, Shaqayeq Arabi and Ali Razavi.
Roots II
April 2017, Dastan's Basement, Tehran, Iran
“Roots” is a work about the concentration of energy in winter roots. Subterranean is the atmosphere; the life-force becoming dense. “Roots” is a show about earth at winter, its nurturing powers and the respect it deserves as a sacred element. It is the mother that gives birth in the spring. The two artists, Fereydoun Ave and Shaqayeq Arabi, despite having worked separately, have observed the same properties in roots and how essential they are to connecting man to its nurturing source: Earth. Following the exhibition at Total Arts at the Courtyard (Dubai, UAE), this is the second time “Roots” is being shown. Arabi, due to her installation being site-specific, has created it at the gallery.
Elsewhere
February-March 2017, Mohsen Gallery, Tehran, Iran
“When I look back, the Garden is a dream to me. It was surpassingly beautiful, and now it is lost, and I shall not see it anymore.”
- The Diaries of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain
Imagine the sensation of place. Not of a vibrant visual assault of colours and shapes, but of a feeling. An impression that tugs on your heart strings. An impression that is hinted at in its very absence. Felt in its loss. Heard in the soft rustle of foliage unseen. The gentle caress of a breeze on your cheek and sounds half-heard somewhere on the edges of your mind. Mohsen Gallery is pleased to announce “Elsewhere” an experiential solo exhibition by Shaqayeq Arabi, which sees the artist take over the 2 x 3 x 10 meter Pasio space of the gallery. “Elsewhere” will connect sky to ground through a sensory installation that engages with the intangible space between the real and unreal, waking and dream, that which exists and that which has been lost forever. Read more...
Totems
May 2016
A totem is a spirit being, a sacred object. Each human is thought to have a spiritual connection or a kinship with another physical being, such as an animal or plant, often called a “spirit-being”.
Suspended - Hanging Garden
December 2015, Curated by Behrang Samadzadegan and Aaran Gallery, Tehran, Iran
Works assembled in this exhibition are products of poetic subjectivity of their creators; works that travel through time and space and are unrestrained by the realities of the world. Defying gravity (both as a natural force and in the complexity of a situation), in form and concept, these group of works suggest motion and fluidity and by blending what is stable and what is mobile, gracefully portraying the uncertainties of our era and world in general.
Study of an Upturned Ziggurat
October 2015, Curated by The Dept. of Signs and Symbols, Brooklyn, New York, USA
The Dept. of Signs and Symbols is pleased to announce the exhibition: Study of an Upturned Ziggurat, Shaqayeq Arabi’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition will feature a site-specific installation made through an intuitive process of assembling urban and organic objects found and collected by the artist. The installation explores notions of transformation, intuition and the intersection of the urban and the natural. Read more...
Roots
November 2014, Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
Roots is a two-person show of two-dimensional and three-dimensional works: Shaqayeq Arabi whose three-dimensional installations are about being uprooted from mother earth. Fereydoun Ave’s works are two-dimensional mix media on paper and canvas about the concentration of energy in winter roots; Subterranean is the atmosphere, the life force becoming dense. This is a winter show about earth, its nurturing powers and the respect it deserves as a sacred element. It is the mother that gives birth in the spring. The two artists even though they have worked separately, have observed the same properties in roots and how essential they are to connecting man to its nurturing source, earth. As two Iranians who have been uprooted from their motherland and have had to lay down roots elsewhere they have experienced first hand this trauma.
Memories Within
November 2012, AB Gallery, Switzerland
Picture a landscape that bears the scars of drought: A pale, dusty horizon of dried out, desiccated palm trees. Some still stand, like scarred and twisted Greek columns, while others, bent under their own weight, have fallen, deformed and warped in various states of collapse – an army of skeletal remains of what was once a lush, verdant oasis.
It was this landscape that inspired Shaqayeq Arabi’s series, Memories Within. Passing through the scene of decay, she was incited to recreate an image of what the trees once were – a sense of compassion causing her to collect dried bushes and plants whose stricken roots still remained rooted in the dry soil. Preserving them became a way for Arabi to extend their life, capturing a moment and honoring their memories, harking back to what they once were, finding beauty even in their death and in doing so, allowing them to bloom again.
Sinking Ships
April 2012, Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
The dhow, once the lifeblood of the UAE, has, with the onset of today’s fast-paced way of life, diminished in importance. Today many of these majestic boats are abandoned and derelict, left prey to the elements until they fall apart. As the old generation passes away, and with it, its seafaring history, and modernity and progress take over, these great behemoths of the sea now lie at the bottom of sandy graves, covered by the rolling coastal dunes or buried beneath the shifting tides. Read more...
Rolled Canvases
July 2010, Curated by Fereydoun Ave, Aun Gallery, Tehran, Iran
Made up of paintings (starched canvases), reliefs (folded canvases) and objects (creased canvases) this exhibition demonstated that although these individual elements may differ visually, together, they provoke questions and comparisons which guide the viewer to the concept of ‘Transformation’. Displaying these elements together leads the audience to the understanding of the process of Rolled Canvases. The significance of Rolled Canvases is the integration of the two mediums of painting and object making, which Arabi has been working in for the last ten years. This exhibition is the crossing point of these two mediums. Through the recycling of her old paintings/canvases, and by shaping and recomposing, she has transformed them into sculptures of new forms. Although they are newly created, traces of their original forms are still visible, like the memories within them and within the artist. Read more...
Scraps
March 2009, Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
Scraps is a collaborative installation with found objects, sculptural works and photographs by Dariush Zandi and Shaqayeq Arabi. Entering the penumbra of the gallery space, with lights focusing on forms and objects hanging from the ceiling, displayed on the walls, standing on the floor, with photographic projections crossing the space and crossing within and among sculptural bodies and metal structures, one is first struck by the “theatrical” atmosphere and dramatic impact of the work. Read more...
Where am I standing?
March 2007, Dubai Dubai Exhibition, curated by Nadin Hammam, Total Arts at the Courtyard, Dubai, UAE
Shaghayeq Arabi examines the role of the ordinary man in his relationship to his surroundings. "By laying out the analogous object-like figures in space I investigate the issue the cryptogrammic nature of the ordinary man, juxtaposing notions of freedom and constraint, certainty and uncertainty, homogeneity and individuality".
The figures are suspended metaphorically in space, again, examining void through presence. "The particular and direct relation between architectural space with a steel rail and the men hanging still and fragile in space creates an insensitive feeling and intensifies the emotional force behind the work". With the puppet-like frail structure of the figures, she creates a dynamic installation giving the audience the chance to either partake or not. She juxtaposes the notion of safety with danger by giving the viewer the power to pull the safety harness of the individual, causing them to move in what she calls "a non-safe space". The ordinary man is always in the power of someone else’s hands.
