Fred Eerdekens and Mohammed Kazem
Poetics and Meanings
8 May–8 June, 2013
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
Al Quoz 1, St 8, Al Serkal Ave, #17
PO Box 18217
Dubai, UAE
T/F +971 (0)4 323 5052
info [at] ivde.net
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde presents an exhibition featuring Mohammed Kazem and Fred Eerdekens. In the works on view each artist holds the material and the ephemeral in a tight dialectic to elicit alternative modes of seeing.
Mohammed Kazem creates tangible interpretations of immaterial forces and social experiences that interpret fleeting source material such as the movement of nurses across a courtyard, or the natural phenomenon of wind and sound. The works range in media from colorful cloth pulled tautly over square wooden canvases to a massive assemblage of industrial scales, while a series of drawings probe our perceptions of environment.
Alongside Kazem’s works, which track immaterial human-driven and natural systems, Eerdekens crafts the intangible forces of light and shadow to create elegant sculptural works comprised of fluid linear forms and playful phrases. The intricate lines of metal sculpture are rendered legible when light is cast on them, to reveal a reflection or shadow of text.
Taken as a whole, these works are not simply about representation and signification; they are kinetic and charged with expressions and experiences that supersede any fixed meaning. Each piece is laced with a barely contained volatility that reflects the rhythm of complex social interactions, language and rhetoric, and invisible natural phenomenon and as a consequence the exhibition demands an active gaze from the viewer.
Whether it be the complex geopolitics of land and identity, the social sphere of industrious medical workers, or the rhetoric of everyday speech, the resists a distant mastery of the object, and instead cultivates a mode of looking that understands and experiences the artworks to reconsider the world around us and our own relationship to that world.
By presenting the works of these artists in dialogue with each other we reconfigure the limits of what constitutes meaning. Such works construct an interpretive framework within a visual vernacular that engenders a form of knowing predicated on modes of seeing.
Fred Eerdekens is a Belgian artist who for the past two decades has been exploring our environment and atmosphere, manipulating light, material and language in playful and complex installations that render presumed stabilities senseless and ephemeral. His works become metaphors for the entanglement between reality and our individual conceptions of it, whereby both become ambivalent and yet palpable. Eerdekens has had solo exhibitions internationally for the past two decades. His work features in public and corporate collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, Bonzano, Italy, The Norton Collection, USA, the MUHKA, Musuem of Contemporary Art, Belgium. A joint exhibition of his and Emirati artist Mohammed Kazem’s works will be held at the gallery in April 2013.
Mohammed Kazem (b. 1969, Dubai, UAE) is a pioneer of contemporary Emirati art who creates conceptual explorations of the environment through works on paper, film, photography and installation. Kazem’s works synthesise the continuously evolving and shifting debates about modernity and the status of citizens within and outside their nation-states. As well as participating in the biennials in Uzbekistan, Singapore, Egypt, Cuba and Bangladesh, Kazem’s work has been presented in several editions of the Sharjah Biennial, winning first prize for his installations in 1999 and 2003. He will return for the second time to the Venice Biennale this year with a solo presentation at the UAE National Pavilion.