Aseel AlYaqoub: The View from Above

Always imagined or invented, nations are anything but a given. Military ceremonies, postage imagery, maps, and heritage sites that shape national identity and imbue it with meaning are the subject of Aseel AlYaqoub’s artistic inquiry. The view from above is a key method in AlYaqoub’s work, which she uses to offer insights into the mechanisms of statecraft.

The View from Above marks the first survey of the artist’s decade of archival research and interdisciplinary practice into symbols and narratives connected to Kuwaiti nationhood and Arab identity from postcolonial time into the present. AlYaqoub is part of a young generation of artists who take a critical stance on colonial histories and existing narratives around modernisation and statecraft in the Gulf. State-building in Kuwait emerged at the intersection of urban modernisation fed by oil revenues and independence from the British protectorate. The exhibition introduces Kuwait as a case study for understanding the ways in which a young state shapes its citizens and traditionalises culture while adopting and adapting ideologies and structures inherited from colonial powers. As a state deeply invested in its visual representation, Kuwait provides a fertile ground for grasping the power of images in efforts of nation-building and self-representation.

Through her series of drawings and blown-glass objects informed by the repetitive and theatrical nature of military routines, the artist uncovers lines of continuity between British colonial rule and the present-day Kuwaiti state. By appropriating and deconstructing postal imagery, she highlights the symbolic force of visual representations to inculcate national narratives of the past and future. An architectural intervention in the exhibition space that vaguely resembles a heritage site raises questions about the production of official history and assertion of local culture. What is the past that a state deems worth preserving? And how does this selected past serve the present?

Aseel AlYaqoub (b. 1986, Kuwait) is an artist and writer based in Kuwait City. Educated at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and Pratt Institute in New York, her inquiries into nation-building span the fields of architecture, history and cultural studies. In 2018, she co-won the first Art Jameel Commission, and in 2021, co-curated the Kuwait Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, with the project Space Wars, revisiting the Gulf War’s conflict and military occupation thirty years later. In 2022, AlYaqoub founded Safat Studios, an artist-run initiative nourishing experimental programmes in Kuwait City. Most recently, she participated in the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale and Desert X AlUla.

The View from Above is Aseel AlYaqoub’s first solo exhibition in Europe. The exhibition is produced by Bildmuseet and curated by Anca Rujoiu.