My view on under standing over views

The work Under Standing Over Views was commissioned by the Ninth Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates in 2009. I realized this work in relation to personal experience I made during the time I lived in Dubai. At that time – it was from 1990–1995 – I still was child and I was shocked by the tremendous contrast between extreme wealth on one side and poverty that went so far that one could not speak about human dignity any more. Unfortunately the situation of workers has hardly changed since then. This was the reason why I decided to work about this hidden dark side of this fancy skyscraper world that was and is build upon the backs poor and exploited immigrant workers who come mainly from South Asia.

The installation is made of thousands of slices of fallen paint collected from cities like Tunis, Berlin, Bizerte, Paris, Cologne, Kiev, Venice, Marseilles and Naples, places I happened to visit between 2006 and 2009. It was important to me to imported these slices from various other countries. They are decays of the walls of mostly dwelling houses and they are exhibits of dilapidation and poverty. I collected them as pieces of time that are showing the histories of places and people who lived there.

The slices are vertically hanging on fine black silk threads. Due to slight movements of air they individually start to swing but they can never go further, they cannot change their position,they are bound like marionettes. The hole hanging structure of the horizontally composed pieces of dry paint forms the map of the United Arab Emirates.

The black silk recalls the colour of the primary fossil energy that metaphorically built this nation, but I also chose black silk because it is the soft and shiny cloth of a traditional gears which is worn from Emirates for festive occasions – the matter that distinguishes the locals from the majority of immigrants.

On the first view, the installation displays harmony, transparency and the airiness of the pending figure of the UAE cartography. While STANDING UNDER the hovering shape a critical understanding steps in. On one hand the whole installation invites you to have a walk under it, it is a aesthetically pleasant experience that is, for me, also related to the tourism industry erecting in the country. Through major campaigns in constructions and advertisement wealth people are attracted by luxury resorts, architectural landmarks, low taxes etc., but most of the visitors in the UAE are not aware of the unfair struggle behind this facade, they do not realize that of thousands of immigrant workers under unbearable working conditions and no safety at work, have to pay with their health and sometimes even with their lives for these pleasures.

Likewise dazzling constructions and wish-fulfilling services prevent the visitors to recognise the reality behind the man-made paradises, the installation too draws the viewer into the visual paradox of seeing the whole cartographic shape never in real but only as its shadow. The OVER VIEW of the entire map is visible only as it’s shadow on the wall which is always a distortion – it looks much different from what it really is. On the other hand the visitor gets all details, when he steps under the hanging slices and risks a closer look. He can see that the map the UAE, where you can hardly find a building older than three or four decades is composed like a puzzle with decaying slices of paint from dwelling houses from other countries.

Why are all these pieces hanging from the ceiling to form the UAE figure? The answer to this question is rooted in my personal experience while I was living in the region. I felt myself uprooted from Tunisia, the country of my origin with an agricultural structure, where life is totally different from the UAE life. The image of the UAE is only a bright shadow of its deeper truth, it deforms the reality and hides all the human efforts and sacrifices daily made to erect a totally unproductive but energy consuming world – a Disneyland for adults.