Ala Ebtekar
Elsewhen
18 January–8 March 2012
The Third Line
Al Quoz, Street 6,
PO Box 72036, Dubai, UAE
T +9714 3411 367
www.thethirdline.com
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Exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally, Ebtekar’s impressive body of work over the past decade has drawn evocative parallels between events unfolding today and events and stories of the past. Challenged by an increasing desire to look towards the future and how to manifest this palpable impulse into a new series of work, he began researching the narratives and concepts of the literary genre of science fiction, where depictions of the future, space flight, and time travel set the stage for narratives of realistic speculation about possible future events.
In an excerpt from an essay by Catherine Wagley on this series, she writes, “Sometimes regression can be retroactive, a move backward that actually catapults you forward. When French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published his dissertation in 1968, the year the Second French Revolution led students to occupy the Sorbonne and workers all over Paris to go on strike, he suggested returning to the past could actually push you into the future. ‘It is because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its difference, … that everything returns,’ he wrote. You feel your way through memory and repeat history because you have changed, so shouldn’t the results be different this time around?
Ala Ebtekar moved back to make Coelestis (after Hafez), and the other intricate images he printed then painted into large, old manuscript pages. Patterned and concentric, the paintings have, at first glance, a traditional, ritualistic feeling. Perfectly spaced golden vines move in from all sides toward star-shaped openings, each arm of which resembles a Persian window cut into an Esfahani-style palace. Given the manuscript Ebtekar worked into, by Persian poet Hafez who wrote in the 14th Century, has achieved divine status, the ritualism of these paintings fits almost too well—except that Ebtekar’s particular approach to precision and repetition is informed more by the language of pixels and vectors than ink and parchment.
One of Ebtekar’s Ayandeh-nameh images, The dark midnight, fearful waves, and the tempestuous whirlpool, shows twisting yellow light against a night sky, like fireworks that erupt in animated action films when a spaceship takes off or a mystical submarine pulls up from the sea. Another shows a mostly-blue room with clouds for a floor and a ceiling that dissolves into stars; uninhabited, the room emanates a surreal breed of serenity. The effect of these two images together is painfully optimistic. They pull together already-familiar languages of romance, regality, pop and possibility and, in doing so, seem to want represent what could be real. Destiny doesn’t go in any one direction, they suggest, nor is it necessarily one thing over another. It could hover forever here, mixed-up, in-between but hopeful.”
In The Third Line’s Project space, Ebtekar’s accumulation of Persian poetry manuscripts is a preface to Ayandeh-nameh, an editioned artists’ book project with artist Binta Ayofemi. The book is stage for intervals, sequences, and actions, both past and present. As an installation of latent materials, Sufic poetry interleaved with his photographs, the manuscripts point to a space of dreams.
About Ala Ebtekar
Ebtekar describes his work as “a visual glimpse of a crossroad where present day events meet history and mythology”. He received his BA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and his MFA degree from Stanford University in 2006. His work has been exhibited internationally and throughout the United States, most recently in “The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989” at ZKM – Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany. He is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, and lives and works in San Francisco.
About The Third Line
The Third Line is an art gallery that represents contemporary Middle Eastern artists locally, regionally and internationally, with a gallery space in Dubai. In addition to on-going exhibitions, The Third Line hosts non-profit, alternative programs to increase interest and debate in the region. This includes film screenings; and an international multimedia forum for artists and designers called Pecha Kucha Night Dubai.
The Third Line also publishes books by associated artists from the region. Books published to date include Presence by Emirati photographer Lamya Gargash (2008), and In Absentia by Palestinian-Kuwaiti Tarek Al-Ghoussein (2009), and most recently Cosmic Geometry, an extensive monograph on Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Karen Marta (2011).
Represented artists include: Abbas Akhavan, Ala Ebtekar, Amir H. Fallah, Babak Golkar, Ebtisam Abdulaziz, Farhad Moshiri, Fouad Elkoury, Golnaz Fathi, Hassan Hajjaj, Hayv Kahraman, Huda Lutfi, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lamya Gargash, Laleh Khorramian, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Pouran Jinchi, Rana Begum, Shirin Aliabadi, Slavs and Tatars, Susan Hefuna, Tarek Al- Ghoussein and Youssef Nabil.
