The Absent Body

How can we conceive of the artist’s body, implicated in an artwork yet existing outside it? This three-part curatorial narrative was sparked by an interest in situating the artist’s missing body. Mapping a framework around young GCC-based artists, it responds to questions such as: how do embodiment and disembodiment manifest through presence, absence, pain, and mediation? Focusing on three entangled axes—the absent body, the suffering body, and the technological body—the following works are reimagined beyond their materiality in an online format, outside the body that performs the work. Starting with the absent body, performativity becomes gestural and residual, evoked by architecture and imprinted on material.

Beyond presence

Emptiness is given form in Maitha Abdalla’s work. The Emirati artist performs the absence of her body by marking and painting with her limbs. She uses her hands and feet to ‘stamp’ the work and relieve the inner tension of not being inside the work. In The Plead (2020), her corporeal imprints denote this distance. Within her practice, being only comes into presence through a withdrawal. There is a need to transmit existence through the work, to solidify something that is not there — a receding body. It is as if she is saying that there can never be complete disembodiment, even through the artwork. The resulting figure is incomplete, reduced to white connective tissue.

In other works, Abdalla conceals her own figure to express a sense of alienation. Hollowed (2019) is a performance video in which the body is cocooned and obfuscated in wool hair and rough hemp. In Self-Portrait with a Mask (2017), she embodies an Other by simultaneously disguising and revealing, holding a presence that morphs into something else — an exposed silhouette, a masked animal. Animal masks feature dominantly in Abdalla’s performances, enacting a hybrid dimensionality that can be considered as an extension of her paintings, which are often populated with costumed characters referencing notions of impurity, sin, and forgiveness.

Architectural markers and residues

For Afra Al Dhaheri, hair is both conceptual thread and raw material. The Emirati artist often decontextualises the idea of hair in structures made of cement, clay, rope, foam, and resin, depicting its capacity to be moulded—tied, pulled, braided, dented. Hair memorises form, she intimates. A bodily extension, its shedding is also indicative of residual forms. One at a Time (2020) is a testament to this surplus and accumulation, tracing the other side of absence in material remnants. The work marks time, its length referencing a duration outside the body. As residue, hair is symbolic of both extreme absent-presence and longevity.

Rooted in the body, yet growing beyond skin, hair lives within and outside boundaries. Al Dhaheri finds analogies in architecture. Spiral Staircase No. 1, 2 & 3 for instance, is based on the image of a staircase wrapped around the ruins of a demolished Mina warehouse near Abu Dhabi’s port. These winding stairwells are a regular outdoor feature of Emirati homes, leading up to the air conditioning units and water supply on the roof. While alluding to cultural constructs that separate the interior from the exterior, privacy from visibility, the work also suggests movement, in particular the ways in which the moving body inhabits space. These ruined architectures become indices of the human form. Decay and motion converge, as do architecture and the body, echoed in Al Dhaheri’s lines and sense of scale.

On containment

In Roofless (2019), a durational performance documented on video, Saudi artist Sara Brahim merges with the Brutalist architecture of a Council Estate in London. Enclosing herself within a circle, her improvisation directs attention to the opposition between concrete and flesh. Her body takes on a spatial expression, shaped by the existing architecture. Investigating how social spaces are occupied, the work is an examination of what the act of dwelling might look like externalised.

The cyanotype series, Who We Are Out of the Dark (2020) amplifies the articulation of gestures around the body, through a semi-transparent covering of Brahim’s own figure. The work arises from the question: how far do we exist outside our bodies? It explores the potential to transcend the body through repetitive, physical movement. The permeability of her material, reflecting light and landscape, reveals this physical language of hand motioning, a series of symbols which initially emerged from an examination of how pain is stored in the body during the grieving process. Signaling the emotional burdens we carry, Brahim comments on the unseen body, the pained body submerged in light and shadow. Expressing a desire for nothingness, she calls it an attempt to become bodiless.