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.
Re
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.