The Suffering Body

This second installment of a curatorial narrative connecting young GCC-based artists attempts to respond to questions around embodiment and disembodiment. Moving from the notion of the absent body to the suffering body, the artists featured here are concerned with the ways in which they can materialise and transform the invisibility of pain. The suffering body is one that occupies a space beyond language, tortured out of existence in macabre fragmentations and ruptured surfaces.

Shedding Skin and Bone

Sara Ahli’s practice is hard on the body, which she often subjects to extreme conditions. The Emirati-Colombian-American artist begins her process by filling balloons with plaster then sucking the air out of them in a vacuum bag. Then she places her own body inside one to understand how it feels. She describes the uneasiness, but also the sense of oneness or comfort in enclosure. She often exerts various kinds of pressure on her forms, interested in how the body bears corresponding imprints. Her engagement with pain and discomfort is visceral, playing out in the breakage, clamping and the ‘suffocation’ of her materials.

Ahli’s understanding of the body originates from her studies in fashion, looking at designs as forms of sculpture, as architectures for the body. In her art practice, skin becomes the wearer of internal organs. In Skin (2021), a fleshy, sagging layer hangs like a drying towel, or an animal hide. It is made from a form of silicone (Dragon Skin) used for prosthetics, which she laid out and tilted to create clumps like fatty tissue and cellulite. Ahli likes working with materials that shift from liquid to solid form, like glass. There is a fluidity in her work, a kind of refusal to be anchored in one state, whether this is through a softness that evokes firmness, or a hardness that seems pliable as in To Stay (Preserve) [2021], where creases run through hardened plaster like veins.

Her work with memory foam stages other kinds of encounters with physical force. Memory foam is a polyurethane material that is responsive to external pressure. Often used in mattresses, it configures itself to the shape of an individual’s body. If balloons became vessels for substance in her work, then memory foam is that which tries to let go of all content. The indentation in Belly Button (2020) evokes a navel, gesturing towards a clamped and cut umbilical cord and the resulting stump which falls off to reveal the umbilicus (or belly button). As the crevice won’t hold for long, Ahli is asking: what happens to the body when you remove the objects that creates stress?

For Ahli, A Feeling Untitled (2020) is an abstract, stifled female body—female perhaps because of the ways in which she uses her whole body to make and mould the work. If so, it is a gutted being of mangled organs. Using a similar process—long balloons wrapped in a zip lock bag, then dipped to make a mould out of alginate—is a minimal array of what appears to be spinal discs, disconnected and arranged forensically in Collection of Bones: A Spine (2021). Together they form an image of paralysis. When the plaster dried, she says they cracked like bones. Her work points to an unmooring, a dissolution of parts rather than the containment she strives for by filling things up and removing the air from around them.

Naked Animals

While the elements of bodily affliction in Ahli’s work remain very much at the physical level, enfolded in epidermal-like layers or bodily entrails, Emirati artist Maitha Abdalla introduces the element of torture and metamorphosis in impossible bodies. In her sculptural installation, Hollowed: The Re-Birth (2019), grotesque figures —with bat wings for legs, or a shopping cart for a torso—are contorted in agony. As if struggling to get outside their bodies, they display a broken physicality, bogged down by strange burdens. For Abdallah, the animal body is the feeling body. Inspired by folk tales that depict hybrid beings, her creatures are fallen humans in a state of distress. Evoking a backstage kind of theatricality, The Re-Birth designates a way out that is imbued with nightmarish elements and torment.

Pregnancy brings in another level of foreignness to the body. The series There is Greater Sorrow I and II (2020), are different versions of a painting revisited. The first draft, There is Life in Empty Rooms (2016) began during Abdalla’s first pregnancy. In 2020, she depicts the uncertainty at that time and a feeling of loss of control during her subsequent, second pregnancy by adding shadow figures to the work: a snarling dog and a hanged man’s double. There’s a sense of strangulation in the mental visions, a fullness to the scene that’s juxtaposed with empty, chalk-like silhouettes waiting to be filled.

Bodily Extensions

Syrian artist Malda Smadi expresses inner turmoil through withdrawals and amputations. Depictions of her body closing in on itself, boxed in, or becoming a faceless hermaphrodite are dominant in her practice. She is drawn to the states that plague people but cannot be seen, such as anxiety, fear and melancholia. Her bodies, largely exposed, are rarely whole. Squeezed into a frame, Body IV (2021), faces the viewer, hands resting open, face concealed, while Body I and Body II (2019) seem to be recoiling in shame or claustrophobia.

Headless I (2019) and Headless II (2020) make the separation between mind and body explicit. The head rests on the lap, or on the side of a naked figure, unburdened. As part of this work, Smadi created a rulebook of all the conditions that could result from not having a head: the loss of memory, no access to vocabulary. In it, she asks: if you sleep without one, won’t you stop having dreams?

In her recent work from 2020, Monster Mouse (2020) features, in addition to another headless body and giant Mickey Mouse, fluid lines and a masculine-looking figure with an obliterated face and masked genitalia, while Girl on Chair I (2020) depicts a woman’s body with precision, seated upright. Strings emerge from her nipples, serving as a points of connection to the outside world. It’s as if the artist had to depart from her own bodily form in order to re-enter it again. Smadi’s work is deeply personal and yet it is also research-driven. Some of her earlier projects include moulds of other women (Breast Sculptures), and responses to women’s stories of loss (In Transit Archives). Her latest abstract representation, Untitled (2021) zooms in on the nipple to create a less figurative, inside-out perspective, rather than outside-in. There’s an opacity to it, an elusive framing. It could be a shrouded eye, an aperture, a way out.

Nadine Khalil is an independent arts writer, researcher, curator and content specialist.