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the optics of a rising sunher in sight
a pace of heads, a space of body
olive leaves memories
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this sea is mine
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The Optics Of A Rising Sun
قلب المناظر
Showing 25/01/2025 - 25/05/2025
Reflecting on the flood of visual information in the age of the internet, Tamara Kalo’s practice questions humans’ ways of perception. The artwork is a contemporary adaptation of a historic instrument: Ibn Al Haytham’s camera obscura. Realized as a copper sculpture, it enables viewers to contemplate a live image of their surroundings through an upside down projection. The artist pairs Ibn Al Haytham’s discovery, who was also the first to formulate that human vision is a result of light entering the eye and then processed by the brain, with copper crafts popularized during the Abbasid Caliphate (AH 132 - 656/750–1258 CE).
The artwork is an interpretation of the Qur’anic verse from chapter Al-Nur (24:35), in which Allah’s light is described as coming from a blessed olive tree that is neither in the west nor in the east. The two lenses of the camera are located opposite of each other, eastward where the sun rises, and westward, where it sets. The antiquated dichotomy of east and west, Global North and Global South, or up and down, and the illusion of past and future, is symbolically bridged. This act of reversal allows for alternative sensorial experiences and brings awareness to the complex and subjective processes of perception.
في إطار تأمُّلها في تدفُّق المعلومات البصرية في عصر الإنترنت، تستكشف تمارا كالو في ممارستها الفنية طرق الإدراك لدى البشر. يمثِّل هذا العمل الفني صياغة معاصرة لآلة تاريخية؛ وهي الكاميرا المظلمة التي اخترعها ابن الهيثم.
يأخذ العمل شكل منحوتة نحاسية، تتيح للمشاهدين التأمل في صورة حية لمحيطهم، معروضة بصورة مقلوبة. تربط الفنانة بين اكتشاف ابن الهيثم، الذي توصّل إلى أن الرؤية البشرية هي نتيجة لدخول الضوء إلى العين ثم معالجته بواسطة الدماغ، وبين الحِرَف النحاسية التي ازدهرت في العصر العباسي (132-656 هـ/750-1258م).
يشير العمل الفني إلى الآية القرآنية في سورة النور (24:35)، والتي تصف نور الله بأنه يوقَد من شجرة زيتون مباركة، لا شرقية ولا غربية. تقع عدستا الكاميرا مقابل بعضهما البعض، شرقًا حيث تشرق الشمس، وغربًا حيث تغرب. يتجاوز العمل الحدود التقليدية بين الشرق والغرب، أو الدول الغربية وغير الغربية، أو بين الأعلى والأسفل، ويفكّك الفاصل الوهمي بين الماضي والمستقبل؛ ليقدِّم رؤية رمزية ومتصلة بهذه المفارقات والتمييزات. يُتيح هذا الفعل العكسي تجارب حسّية بديلة، ويعمِّق إدراكنا لتعقيدات الرؤية وذاتيّتها.
Her In Sight
2024
This work was done during the Bait Shouaib Residency by Athr Foundation, in Al Balad, Jeddah, KSA.
These prints are all one of one large negatives hand printed within the roshan-turned-camera-obscura in the Bait Shouaib residence. The roshan has historically been a space for women to see while remaining unseen, looking into the public while remaining within the privacy of one’s interior space. By print- ing images directly onto silver gelatin paper from the light bouncing in from the exterior, which in this case is that of Bait Nassif and the courtyard, the process reflects the function this architectural roshan element lends itself to.
The line between what is public and private are materially merged through the medium of light entering the porous roshan space to suggest the more interwoven relationship of our sight to space.
a pace of heads, a place of body
2024
single channel video, 1:48:21
This work was done during the Bait Shouaib Residency by Athr Foundation, in Al Balad, Jeddah, KSA.
The bedspace, is an area that is ubiquitous and personal, a space where our attention is surrendered to the realm of the subconscious. It is a space that holds many tensions, a space of dreams and nightmares, and a space of comfort and discomfort. By weaving my body into the bed frame using a green ribbon, i contrastingly create a cage-like enclosure that offers a safe space of imagination. But by having the material be that of a green screen, it opens the potential for this enclosure to be infinite in its potential representation. The material green becomes immaterial in its overlay of video, the green screen then insinuates a multitude of possibilities, it also references the virtual world which has become a sort of collective subconscious, but also a place where our attention is pulled, and our rest interrupted. The virtual world is also one way we enmesh the outside world within our private sphere. informed by Tricia Hersey’s “rest as resistance” i’ve been thinking about the ways in which rest has been robbed of us, and thus the space of dreams, imagination and resistance.
Olive Leaves Memories
2024
Commissioned by MMAG and exhibited at How to Time Travel curated by Rana Beiruti, assistant curation Ranwa Abughoush.
Paper, olive leaves, plastic, thread, silver gelatin paper
23x30x1.90 cm
Olive Leaves Memories is a folding book that pays homage to the olive tree in a time when unfolding violence has empeded what should have been a sacred harvest season.
The handmade book holds space for the olive tree and recalls its stories through a visual record of its traces and marks. By embedding the leaves within recycled plastic and using them to form photograms, it is a multifaceted and collaborative endeavour between the artist and the olive tree. The book itself is bound with threads dyed with pigment extracted from the olive leaves.
The book is a call to listen to the land and its memories, with particular reference to the olive tree, its ancestral significance and its capability of outliving generations.
All the leaves used were collected from a tree in the backyard of the home the artist grew up in.
