| Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures are like Robert Smithson’s “quiet catastrophes,” moments of disaster and decay frozen in time and space. She builds elaborate, intensely physical, large-scale sculptures of what she has called “impossible architecture” in various states of decline. Depicting forms more historical than contemporary—cathedral spires, classical columns, large pipe organs, and Gothic towers, which are often toppled, fractured, or burned—her sculptures suggest ruins from a distant past. Yet Al-Hadid’s interest in science—the big bang theory, speculations about black holes, and the transformation associations with the violent incidents that characterize current wars and political upheavals—place these objects firmly in the present. |  |
Anne Ellewood, Senior Curator at the Hammer Museum
Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures are like Robert Smithson’s “quiet catastrophes,” moments of disaster and decay frozen in time and space. She builds elaborate, intensely physical, large-scale sculptures of what she has called “impossible architecture” in various states of decline. Depicting forms more historical than contemporary—cathedral spires, classical columns, large pipe organs, and Gothic towers, which are often toppled, fractured, or burned—her sculptures suggest ruins from a distant past. Yet Al-Hadid’s interest in science—the big bang theory, speculations about black holes, and the transformation associations with the violent incidents that characterize current wars and political upheavals—place these objects firmly in the present. And into the future does her fascination with science fiction and notions of time travel catapult her works. Al-Hadid’s sculptures seem to traverse time, from the ancient to the present, along a long and sweeping trajectory.
For the past several years Al-Hadid has made discrete objects, larger than human scale, yet, situated in the middle of the gallery so that visitors can easily walk around them. For her exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Al-Hadid has chosen to create a multifaceted sculptural installation consisting of several interdependent parts, which occupies the entire gallery. Visitors physically enter the work rather than walking around its periphery and, in some sense, observe the work from within. Titled Water Thief, the sculpture is inspired by a water clock built in 1206 by Al-Jazari, a prominent engineer and inventor who lived in northeastern Syria, not far from the city of Aleppo, where Al-Hadid was born and lived until the age of five, when she immigrated to the United States with her family.
In Water Theif, Al-Hadid does not set out to create a simulacrum of Al-Jazari’s famous clock, with its decorative façade of robotic figures and flanking falcons. Rather, she sticks to the clock’s basic mechanics, constructing each element and the channels that connect them, including a gutter to guide the water form an unseen source, as well as a reservoir, float tank, siphon, waterwheel, gears, drum dial, and pointer. Like something unearthed during an archaeological dig, the water clock is nonfunctioning, and several of its parts have fallen out of place or are cracked and leaking.
Despite Al-Hadid’s desire to focus on the working of the water clock rather than to emulate Al-Jazari’s aestheticization of his apparatus, Water Thief is not at all stripped-down or minimal, but quite the contrary. Like all her sculptures, it has a baroque sensibility, the hard architectural structures embellished with dense layers of material, akin to both the strata of geologic rock formations and more organic fluid forms. She places the clock within a context resembling a columned temple, suggesting an ancient, or perhaps mythological, setting for this abandoned machine. The float tank becomes a small peak, its shape inspired in part by the mountain-like formation that encases the woman in Hans Memling’s strange 1475 painting Allegory of Chastity.
Al-Hadid commitment to ornamentation is a deliberate attempt to integrate Eastern culture into the practices of Western sculpture. Twentieth-century art criticism and practice were punctuated by arguments for stripping sculpture of decoration in order to differentiate it from design or craft, and allow it to “progress” to its most essential and ideal form. This seems a particularly Western preoccupation. The ornamentation visible throughout the Middle East—Egyptian tiles, Arabic calligraphy, and Islamic textile patterns—inspires both the surface treatments in Al-Hadid’s sculptures and the structures themselves. Several turn, or rotate, around a central stabilizing element. The pattern of the labyrinthine floor of the cathedral at Chartres, France, has served as both cultural and structural inspiration. Spirals, which are fundamental to several components of Water Thief, particularly the remarkably detailed gears and drum dial, are inspired by both the natural and cultural, including the shape of galaxies and the slow rotation of Muslim pilgrims around Kaaba.
Al-Hadid’s sculptures, the histories, and the sites they invoke, are dislocated in time and space. This sense of displacement comes, in part, from her interest in bringing non-Western conceptions of time and space into the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Europe and the United States. But it is also inspired by her personal experiences as a Muslim growing up in the United States, where she lived in two different worlds and learned to bridge her Middle Eastern background with her Western life, rather than considering them wholly distinct. In the end, her sculptures, too, act as bridges, connecting disparate times, places, and people.
-Excerpted Version from Essay for Hammer Projects: Diana Al-Hadid.
