After four years of exile, Shurooq Amin returns to Kuwait “bigger and stronger and louder”.
The artist’s long-awaited homecoming show features 18 paintings and one installation that parody both real life and fiction.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘The Moving Doll House (The moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin)’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
A triumphant return
In March 2012, three hours after Shurooq Amin (b. 1967, Kuwait) opened her solo show at AI M. Gallery in Kuwait City, the exhibition was shut down by authorities for being “pornographic” and “anti-Islamic”. The exhibition was entitled “It’s a Man’s World” – a phrase Amin echoes wittily in her homecoming exhibition, fittingly entitled “It’s a Mad World” (2016), at Contemporary Art Platform Kuwait.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘Far from the Maddening Crowd (Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy), 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
It has been four years since the censorship, a period which saw the artist take enormous strides in her career. In 2013 Shurooq Amin received the Artist of the Year title from the Arab Woman Awards, became the first Kuwaiti female artist to be auctioned at Christie’s, and exhibited her 2013 series Popcornographic at Art Dubai. In 2014 Amin’s series We’ll Build This City on Art and Love was exhibited in London and Dubai. In the same year she was nominated by Art Radar for the 2014/2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, and in 2015 she became the first Kuwaiti female artist to exhibit at the Venice Biennale.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘That Side of Paradise (This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald)’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
Amin’s 2016 return to Kuwait thus marks a triumphant return. The 2012 censorship only made her want to “come back bigger and stronger and louder”, and come back she did. With her career now on an unstoppable momentum, the artist reflects on her homecoming show in an interview with Arab Times Online:
After being shutdown and censored, […] to be asked to show in Kuwait again is validating and comforting. I feel like I have accomplished something in the sense that I have proven myself over the past four years. […] I don’t think this exhibition has been a long time coming. I believe that everything comes at the right time for you in your life. I feel ready, I feel Kuwait is ready, and the work is ready, so it all comes together.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘A Handful of Lust (A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh)’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
“It’s a Mad World”
Curated by Martina Corgnati, who also curated the Contemporary Practices Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale that Amin was part of, “It’s a Mad World” features 18 paintings and an installation. The latter, consisting of three paintings and three projections, builds on Amin’s Venice installations that were a fresh departure from her usual medium of paint and canvas. The artist’s combination of photography and painting results in a distinctive aesthetic that is piercing and aggressive, while emanating an unmistakable tenderness and humanity.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘Life of Why (Life of Pi by Yann Martel)’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy that artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
The titles of the paintings are works of art themselves, each a parody of a renowned work of fiction in Western literature (Amin is a PhD and Professor in English Literature). The works themselves harness the power of a rich directory of symbols, icons and puns sourced from religious iconography, cultural stereotypes and popular culture. Reality and imagination come together to effect enormous narrative power: the paintings speak of everything from taboos to stereotypes and from social hypocrises to women’s rights. Nothing escapes Amin’s brush; the exhibition catalogue quotes the artist:
When I hear, see or experience something that infuriates or hurts me, I address it in a series. I poke at it, analyze it, discuss at it, live and breathe at it until the series is completed.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘Lovers in the Sun (Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani)’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
The multiple narrative nuances in her tableaux occur parallel to an exuberant, layered aesthetic. Curator Corgnati writes in the catalogue:
[…] one single layer is never enough for Shurooq Amin: she needs to lead the viewer from one step to another, gliding lightly but seriously from concepts to visions, from verbal language to pictorial images. Never stop! There is always something else, another depth that one has maybe not reached yet.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘The Toy Luck Club (The Toy Luck Club by Amy Tan)’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
“Man” to “Mad”: From local to global
In the Arab Times Online interview Amin states that “In a Mad World” is a “semantic and phonetic full circle” – one that extends her motifs from the local to the global and enlarges her artistic outlook as a whole. She states:
We came from ‘It’s a Man’s World’ that was censored and shut down to ‘It’s a Mad World’. The previous show in Kuwait was an exploration of the hidden lives of men in the region; it was very specific. Now, as a result of my experiences internationally, it has turned to a more global message. ‘It’s a Mad World’ refers to the crazy and nonsensical things that are happening in the world we live in. I tried to make the title musical and match the other titles and the meaning flows very organically.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘For Whom the Bed Tolls (For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway)’, 2016, mixed media, 140 x 162 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
The more global outlook stems from shifts in part in Amin’s own perceived identity and situatedness in the world. She tells Mens Passion Online:
I think these past years have driven us further towards seeing ourselves take our place within the international community of artists. I no longer see myself as a ‘Kuwaiti artist’, I consider myself international. The past four years have taken me there.
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Shurooq Amin, ‘Till Mad Do Us Part: A Roof of One’s Own (A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Wolf )’, 2016, mixed media, 110 x 200 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Contemporary Art Platform.
With regards to her hopes and aspirations for art, she states:
If there is a wrong, I want to be the one to put it right. It sounds grand, but if we deconstruct the world’s issues, and look at them one at a time, create an open window for people to view it through, we can generate outrage through awareness – then things will change.
Michele Chan
1144
Related Topics: Kuwaiti artists, painting, installation, censorship, art and politics, events in Kuwait
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