Joud Al-Tamimi on Sulaïman Majali | Writing Highlight

Revisit Joud Al-Tamimi​’s text responding to Sulaïman Majali​’s ​‘false dawn’ (2021), an amorphous work presented as part of our ONE WORK series in February 2022 iterated as ​‘20210704_video.mp4’.

Artist and curator Joud Al-Tamimi’s text reflects on their encounters with the work and conversations with Majali, as well as their methodologies and the work’s themes.

The liberatory here is bound up with strategies of evasion and divergence that turn the task of​‘writing about’ on its head and instead invite a different kind of engagement that is a​‘speaking nearby’ and other things at once. It is an invitation to engage with the artist/​clown a mode of thinking and a language that dwells in/​within the​‘otherwise’.

–Joud Al-Tamimi on ​‘false dawn’

false dawn was an exhibition developed for Glasgow International 2021. Taking its title from a zodiacal light visible on the horizon before sunrise, the exhibition considered the site on the former location of the 1938 Empire exhibition in Glasgows’ Bellahouston Park, as one of rupture; a garden where 1 might encounter _​_​_​_​_​_​. Working at the fold, at a time when _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​, _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​and _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​, false dawn brought to the surface wider and persistent questions around what the artists might *mean* by performance-led research, _​_​_​_​_​_​as a haunting of publics, unfurling refusals; _​_​_​_​_​of the singular self; defines and confines _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​; separations between the digital and the neural; _​_​_​_​_​_​, wandering fool

Through an insisting on art, in its thinkability and speakability, as revelatory praxis, as an embodied transcendence of​“matter”, they position the artist as fugitive clown, a scheherazade in the court of pharaoh, as disruptive dreaming slipping under enduring imperial imaginaries. In the stirs of divine poetics, the sacred valley is the fold at the uniting of the ontological and the epistemological – the stick is a snake is a gun is a device.

From whatever there might be of a radical disbelief in the object ~4 there is no such thing~ they record themselves wandering around the space, as both an address to and a haunting by some impossible audience. For this event, the artists bring with them the remnants, debris and collateral of what reveals itself as impossible film, divergent splintering of the contradictory and simultaneous/​bewildered worlds of becoming/​forever arriving, perpetual guest!/ in an assembly of impossibilities.