Shadi Al-Atallah:
Rapture
Steve Turner
Los Angeles, USA

Rapture takes its name from the sensationalised, end-of-world feeling that saturated the news at the time of its making; a moment in which violence, alien sightings and the fear of the other competed for space on the same feed. Working from his ongoing collection of wrestling imagery, Al-Atallah blends the personal with the political, attempting to metabolise what he was witnessing. The figures in these paintings are caught mid-action in domestic spaces threaded with medical and electrical equipment, their forms entwined and indistinguishable, poised at the edge of a quarrel or an embrace. Voyeuristic and intrusive in feeling, the scenes are deliberately ambiguous; the psychosexual and the violent collapse into one another, asking what it means to hold and to be held and to consume and to be consumed.

Rapture is also a work of world-building, drawing on cold-war era depictions of alien invasion, the fear of communism, and the iconography of science fiction cinema, with colours that are deliberately loaded with that history. Rooted in Al-Atallah's longstanding interest in religion and the way it constructs worlds and tells stories, the exhibition proposes its own cosmology, one in which figures that might be aliens, lovers, or something else entirely move through spaces that feel both familiar and profoundly strange. Whether they are making love or devouring one another is left, purposefully, unresolved.

Year:

2023

Index