WINTER: Solo Exhibition by AYMAN YOSSRI DAYDBAN

Winter explores the mobility of an object through temporal and spatial realities, foregrounding and reimaging modes of relationality and connection at a time of ecological emergency. The colossal installation is an invitation to re-orient us with the Ihram as an object tethered to a critical and historic site. The presentation highlights the artist as a student of Modernism, whose practice is threaded with codes of abstraction and conceptualism, typically selecting self-contained and self-referential art-objects that are infused with an almost anxious relationship with the world.

 

Winter expands on Ayman Yossri Daydban’s seminal Ihramat series (2012), in which the simple Ihram, a plain white cloth worn by pilgrims in Islam, is stretched over rectangular wooden panels. At its genesis, the series is an exercise on how to pick an object that can unravel relationships between the body and its dominant economic and political structures. For the artist, the Ihram is a flat object that has long been a perfect vehicle to render male bodies, painterly abstractions or reliefs, and renders a system of relations that determine the subjectivity or identity of a person.

Winter marks a shift within the series, registering the climate crisis as a hyperobject to which the object of the Ihram is bound to.  According to Timothy Morton, Hyperpbjects refer to sticky things that are massively intertwined or distributed in time and space relative to the human experience. This system of relations between the climate crisis and the object of Ihram is now site for speculative intervention. The artist establishes the weaved object -- now thickened with various course yarn and fur– within climatic changes, reminding us of what is at stake.