Different Abstractions_PR_Feb11

5a Porchester Place, London W2 2BS T: +44 (0)20 7402 7125
[email protected], www.greencardamom.net
PRESS RELEASE
Different Abstractions: Works by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Hadi Tabatabai and Hajra Waheed
Green Cardamom, 10 March – 15 April 2011
Private view, 9 March, 6.30 – 8.30pm
Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Parkverbot (Looted Art), 2010
Green Cardamom presents Different Abstractions: Works by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Hadi Tabatabai and Hajra
Waheed. The three artists in this exhibition share a language of geometric abstraction, but with
distinctive approaches. Nadia Kaabi-Linke gathers ideas from her urban surroundings, producing work
that embodies contradiction, and using her titles to create further dissonance in meaning. Hadi
Tabatabai’s works are meticulous constructions from which the artist attempts to erase narrative and
meaning. His spare, abstract forms invite contemplation, and offer us zones of ‘quietude’ where time can
be slowed down, and we have the space to look into ourselves. Hajra Waheed combines physical traces
of the real with patterns that are often emptied of their narrative. The combination creates mysterious
works that seem like secret notes or ciphers, which the viewer does not have the full code for.
Parkverbot (Looted Art) is an ordinary public bench that Kaabi-Linke ‘looted’ from a Berlin canal-side and
covered with bird spikes. In converting something where people sit down to take a break into something
where it is ‘forbidden to park’ (the literal translation of parkverbot) she alludes to the ‘contradictions in
capitalism’ where the pursuit of the good life seldom allows people the luxury of taking breaks. The
familiarity of the object as a place of rest and contemplation by the public has been replaced by its status
as art object with a torturously spiked surface, an object of sadistic curiosity. The English title of the work
‘Looted Art’ unlocks a completely different reading, alluding to ideas of cultural restitution and the
peculiar legal and economic status of looting.
Tabatabai’s works occupy two seemingly conflicting realms simultaneously: of craft and making; and of
the intellectual modernist grid. His elegant works are meticulously constructed out of thread, grout, paint
and wood, and play on symmetry, repetition, and geometric abstraction. Tabatabai acknowledges Agnes
Martin’s art, writing and personality as a formative influence. Although he met her only briefly, he counts
her engagement with his work as one of the ‘pats on the back’ that have kept him going. But while
Martin called herself an abstract expressionist, Tabatabai has moved away from anything that could be
construed as a gesture. He refers to his works as drawings, paintings and sculptures, but these terms are
inexact approximations. His paintings, made from thread are in truth reliefs; and his grout works, are
objects that are hung on the walls. His thread paintings comprise of polyester threads spanned in front of
a painted wooden surface. By varying the distance between them and by his use of colour and shape,
Tabatabai creates visual confusion where the figure and ground fade into each other. His ‘grout pieces’
1
look like minimal paintings, echoing works by an earlier generation of artists employing the tropes of
minimalism. It is only the materials (styrene, acrylic, grout, wood) that hint at the constructed nature of
their ‘truth’.
Hajra Waheed’s mixed media drawings, collages and paintings reveal a fascination for the idea (and
equipment) of surveillance, intelligence operations and war. This fascination is at least partly a result of
her having been raised in the vast gated headquarters of Saudi Aramco (the world’s largest transnational
oil corporation) cosseted by two US air bases. Waheed’s work can be seen as an ongoing exercise in
unpacking Saudi Aramco and its expatriate experience in relation to ‘identity formation, political history,
popular imagination and the global impact of American culture and power’. Her delicate works appear to
be recovered artefacts from a history where the lost, the real and the imagined commingle. Architectural
Studies is a series of 16 mixed media drawings accompanied by a typewritten page that describes the
performance characteristics of the airplane engine. The series documents the aerial plans of 16 of the
oldest mosques in the world taken from a popular coffee table book on the history and architecture of
mosques. Below the plans are cut and taped tiny fragments of images of the American U-2 spy craft
printed on mylar. There are four loose groups, with each sharing the same ‘Article’ number – the U-2
equivalent of a ‘mission’ flown by an aircraft. The history of the U-2, which remains in service even now, is
an illustrious one: active in the Cuban missile crisis as well as Vietnam, they were mostly deployed over
the USSR in the 1950-60s from a secret base in northern Pakistan. An echo of the high-flying U-2 is found
in the controversial drones operating in Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan today. The juxtaposition of
the mosques and the spy plane, despite the aged paper, seem pregnant with contemporary resonances.
Notes to Editors
Nadia Kaabi-Linke (born 1978, Tunis, Tunisia. Lives and works in Tunis and Berlin)
Kaabi-Linke trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis. She has a PhD in philosophy and the sciences of
art from the Sorbonne University, Paris. She is a winner of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Arts Prize, to be
unveiled at Art Dubai in March 2011. Her work is currently showing in Drawn from Life, a Green
Cardamom project at Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal. In 2009 she took part in ‘Provisions for the Future’, 9th
Sharjah Biennial and ‘Aftermath’, the 25th Alexandria Biennial for Mediterranean Countries. Recent
exhibitions have included ‘Drawn from Life; Drawing Form’, Green Cardamom, London (2009),
‘Africaines’, Second Panafrican Culture Festival, Algiers (2009), ‘Kaabi-Linke/Kosuth’, Centro Culturale
teresa Orsola Bussa de Rossi, Fossano (2009), ‘Urban Traces’, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP,
Berlin (2009), ‘Art Connections: Arab Contemporary Artists’, El Marsa Gallery, Tunis (2008) and ‘The
Invisible and the Visible’, Orwohaus, Berlin (2008).
Hadi Tabatabai (born 1964, Mashad, Iran. Lives and works in California)
Tabatabai will take part in Art Dubai, 2011 with Green Cardamom. He was Artist in Residence at the
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito in 2010. He won the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2008
and was a semi-finalist in the SFMOMA SECA Award in 2004. Tabatabai has a BSc in Industrial Technology
from California State University and a BA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Selected exhibitions include
‘Solo Show’, Indel/Jacobs, Marfa (2009), ‘The Space of a Line’ (solo show), Brian Gross Fine Art, San
Francisco (2009), ‘IRAN diVERSO: Black or White?’ (2009), Verso Artecontemporanea, Turin (2009), ‘Mashq:
Repetition, Mediation, Meditation’, Green Cardamom, London (2009), ‘East of the West’, SOMARTS, San
Francisco (2008) and ‘Drawings & Works on Paper II’, Patrick Heide Art Projects, London (2006).
Hajra Waheed (born 1980, Calgary, Canada. Lives and works in Montreal)
Hajra Waheed has a Masters Degree in Education from the McGIll University, Montreal and a BFA from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected awards include the Visual Arts Travel Grant, CALQ (Conseil
des arts et des lettres du Québec), Montréal (2009) and the FQRSC (Fonds de recherche sur la société et la
culture), Montréal (2008). She was part of ArtHK, 2010, with Green Cardamom and will be taking part at
Art Dubai 2011 with Green Cardamom. Selected exhibitions include ‘Chimera City: Everday Spectacles’,
Mercer Union: Center of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2011), ‘Drawn from Life: Drawing Form’, Green
Cardamom, London (2009), ‘Paper Planes’, SAVAC Juried Members Show, VMAC Gallery, Toronto (2009),
‘Lines of Control’, Green Cardamom, London (2009), ‘Real Mountain’, Eva B. Gallery, Montreal (2007),
‘ARAMACO Stills’ (solo show), Gallery 2019, Chicago (2006), and ‘Superfantastic Art Engine Collective’,
Fabrica, Treviso (2006).
2
Images / further information:
Justine Blau, [email protected], 020 7402 7125
Green Cardamom
5a Porchester Place, London, W2 2BS
T: +44 20 7402 7125 / [email protected] / www.greencardamom.net
Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday, 12pm to 6pm
3