Whether gazing into the dusty haze of Jeddah’s cityscape or scanning the columns and rows of the graphic design grid system, patterns emerge. Everywhere, operations of information-organization are underway. Numbers and geometry. Proportions, harmonizations and combinations. Symbolic messages on material culture become visible. Architecture as exchange and communication. Concrete and steel thrustingtowards the sky like jagged lines on a chart, organizing large amounts of data.
Consecrated Networks is Basmah Felemban’s first solo exhibition, presenting across three gallery spaces a backlog of documentation, experimentation and supporting material that built her decade-long portfolio of multimedia, research-based works. From looking at theoretical aesthetics of theological architecture to Islamic cosmology, she dovetails into ideas of seen and unseen universes, tapping into psychoanalytic concepts, memory and nostalgia. Like the built and natural environments, patterns in this exhibition emerge and are deployed as literary devices: catfish as a vehicle for concealment in plain sight, architectural niches as the uncanny valley, pilgrimage as data transfer, stone as the original hard drive, urban voids as limbo.
This exhibition reveals the artist’s playful interpretation of the role that archives play in the future. Felemban positions the archive as subconscious, an organic storehouse of memory-traces that are occasionally re-arranged in accordance with new circumstances. She looks at the world-building capacities of dreams, and architecture as monument—both, equally polysemic forms undergirding larger symbolic systems. She abstracts architecture to view it as a ritual of construction and deconstruction: to strip the constituents of a whole to their very forms and essences, revealing the ways the parts are interrelated and arranged in symbolically loaded poetry.
About Basmah Felemban
Basmah Felemban was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She is a self-taught graphic
designer with an interest in symbolism and Islamic metaphysics.
Consecrated Networks is curated by Ruba Al-Sweel, an independent curator and artist focusing on media theory and digital communications.
Exhibition design and graphics courtesy of Mohammed Tatour of Mooni Studio.
1 The uncanny valley effect is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object
