Ahmed Abdalla
Witness: A story without a narrator#7
Ahmed Abdalla is best known for abstract paintings informed by archaeological layers, ambiguous calligraphic and pictographic marks, and references both to his traditional upbringing in his native Egypt and to his experience as a contemporary Western artist. His work is a mysterious meditation on cultural collisions, memory, and history.
In Witness, Abdalla extends his aesthetic approach to art in three dimensions. Objects replace text, but the coloration and references to a Middle Eastern landscape proceed directly from his paintings. The specific historical inspiration for this installation is the Denshwai Incident. In 1906, in the village of Denshwai, British officers went to shoot domestic pigeons on private land. This led to a violent scuffle, after which several Egyptian farmers were unjustly executed by the occupation government. Abdalla seeks not to illustrate this historical event, but to tap its emotional resonances to create a poetic place of myth and remembrance. Here, the train literally disappears into the past, yet triggers a paradoxical illumination.
Image: Ahmed Abdalla, Witness: A story without a narrator#7, (detail), 2007, Lent by the Artist