Lothar Baumgarten, Unsettled Objects, 1968 – 1969. Single – slide projection, 81 35mm images, colour; 14 minutes 50 seconds, dimensions variable. Installation view: Unsettled Objects, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021. Photo: Sharjah Art Foundation

SS: How would you describe your curatorial approach for Unsettled Objects?

OK: The starting point was an acquisition of Lothar Baumgarten’s Unsettled Objects (1968-9), which I had seen at a young age. It is a slide carousel projection of objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum, which to me, have always looked hollowed of life. Baumgarten’s interplay of text and image encourages the viewer to consider points of origin. belonging and restitution. I put this together when the world was in lockdown and I considered what it meant for these subjects/objects to be perennially in lockdown, away from their native lands, sites unseen? That was the starting point. From then on, I began to consider a choice of venue. The recently restored Flying Saucer is a carousel too; it was perfect to elucidate this. I began to think about what would a carousel of objects that exist between sleep and dream, look like? Could they encourage us to ask questions about the ontology of the image? Of how the Euro-centric narratives that have become entrenched in history, influence how one receives an image? How could an architecture, an interplay of situated gestures between artworks, push back against these mythologies and create a different form of visuality?

Lothar Baumgarten, Unsettled Objects, 1968 – 1969. Single – slide projection, 81 35mm images, colour; 14 minutes 50 seconds, dimensions variable. Installation view: Unsettled Objects, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021. Photo: Sharjah Art Foundation

SS: As you mentioned, the artwork Unsettled Objects (1968–9) by the late conceptual artist Lothar Baumgarten lay the foundation for this show. What drew you to this work and how did it become the catalyst for the ideas that are explored in this exhibition?

OK: I first encountered the work for the first time in 1997 and it haunted me. Perhaps because I studied and practiced the act of making cinema, I believe in the spectral aspects of the ‘haunting’ image that sediments and alters the mechanisms through and by which we see ourselves and others. The work was acquired before the global lockdown. I had met Lothar two years before he passed away and had inquired if one day I could acquire this work for a Collection in the Arab World or in Africa, where I felt it belonged and could create a different form of dialogue. After his passing, Hoor Al Qasimi and I went through the motions to bring this into the SAF Collection. Now it was in storage haunting me to come to life and thus it began. The time had come to open up to a new panoply; to put this work in conversation with artworks, which engage the very subjects and experiences articulated in Unsettled Objects (1968-9) itself.

Sarah Abu Abdallah, Saudi Automobile, 2011.Colour video with sound, car and pink paint; 10-minute single channel HD video on loop. Installation view: Unsettled Objects, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021. Reproduced by Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Sharjah Art Foundation

SS: This exhibition attempts to investigate what you argue is the possibility of ‘rethinking’ the colonial imagination. Could you unpack your thinking around this further?

OK: There are loose threads that bind together the artworks in the exhibition: Intimacies—between objects and subjects within the artworks; the evolution of forms in contested geo-political landscapes; the relationship between myth-making and perceived truth; the concept of mining the archaeology of lived experience and the multifarious ways that artists have chosen to express these across three generations. These concepts collectively are anchored in a panoptical constellation that wraps around the form of the Flying Saucer, fostering a dialogue that is devoid of any sense of hierarchy. The works are not chronologically or geographically ordered as would be in the ethnographic setting of Baumgarten’s artwork. Rather, they are thematically posited to create a way of looking that asks the viewer to consider these subjects not as ‘subaltern’, but instead as active agents of an inclusive collective imagination—one that exists outside of the bounds of colonial imagination.

SS: The artworks in the show are from artists who all have a relationship with the Foundation and come from varying geopolitical contexts. How did this play into your framework for the show?

OK: Almost every artwork in the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection is from an artist who holds some form of deep resonance and connection with the Foundation. Some artists have worked with SAF for many years, others more recently, so this is an implicit and unique facet of working with these works from this Collection. There is a sense of ‘knowing’ between the Foundation staff and these artists; of mutual trust and respect. This allows one the space to be playful and to experiment.

Dawoud Bey, various works, 1983 (printed 2019).Archival pigment print; dimensions variable. Installation view: Unsettled Objects, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2021.Photo: Sharjah Art Foundation

SS: You also make specific reference to the concept of ‘wintering’ in your exhibition text. Could you please unpack this further and share more about how it connects to your thoughts for the show?

OK The notion of ‘wintering’ is about an interiority: it is an essential time of retreat and reflection, but also of withdrawal, a sanctioned form of quiet. This occurs for individuals in certain parts of the world, i.e. the Western world, during the winter months of December to February. That said, many countries in the so-called ‘global south’ do not experience this same temporal order; their winters occur at different times; or they may not have winters at all. Thus, I felt the concept was a useful one to think of interior thought, but it was clearly defined in literature and science from a largely Western perspective. That said, as this exhibition was constructed, the whole world was shuttered off: Isolated, collectively indoors, one could argue that there was a phenomenological sense of affinity amongst great expanses in the same temporal order that had not necessarily occurred in the same fashion before.

SS: The exhibition is also situated within discourse that considers identity politics from entry points, including race, ethnicity, restitution, and spaces of knowledge production. Could you share more about the significance of this and how these debates filter through into the exhibition itself?

OK: Race, ethnicity, restitution and knowledge production are all inherently part of the formation of this exhibit and undergird almost all of the works to some degree. Yet, I did not parse these specific aspects out and define them bluntly because I felt that it would defeat the very purpose at hand here, which is to create a theatrical presentation of emotions that arise out of the collective resonances and dissonances of artistic practices and experiences. In a sense, I have come to a position theoretically where I am interrogating one fundamental question: What does a celebratory visuality look like? One that encompasses diverse cross-sections of society, across race, class and gender? What does it mean to let the work of art play its affective role with the audience and to evade the sense of the ‘fight’ and struggle at every turn? I believe the struggle is in getting these voices out into the world; that can be my job; but the works, they live and breathe to speak for themselves.