… It’s been almost 5 years since we met for the first time. I was preparing at that time, for the Venice Biennale, the Pavilion of Iraq, the country where you were born. The meeting was much more than a simple workshop visit. In a space somewhere in Forest, a sort of empty garage, you had prepared a small exhibition. You thought it was important that I could physically experience your work, instead of showing me a series of photos on your computer screen. The meeting was a real invitation to watch, to feel a transformation, to play a game. And this game, we call it art. It is essential to look in this way at the capacity to give, through the imagination, another meaning to things. The cap of a water bottle can easily become a city for a child. A stick from a tree can even turn into a bus. As an artist, you play, of course, but seriously, after having thought and weighed it carefully. What most of us kick out and throw away becomes the raw material for your artwork. And just like Picasso who put together a saddle and a handlebar on a bicycle to make an assembly, you bring together objects by linking them to each other, by juxtaposing them, by temporarily attaching them. Each work is like an idea, a photo that has not yet been taken, an impulse or a thought. It tells us where to look, invites us to connect form and space. In addition, the spectator often becomes part, protagonist, accomplice, especially in performances. The spectator becomes a carrier, a base, and therefore sees himself reduced to an object. The moments are modeled in the image of a sculptor who shapes a face in clay. Mohammed Alani borrows or quotes not only visible elements of recent art history, but also principles that he turns upside down. Nevertheless, Mohammed Alani is above all an artist who, intuitively, constructs images which enhance the banality of everyday life with playful simplicity.
February 23, 2018
Letter: to Mohammed Alani
Philippe Van Cauteren
director of S.M.A.K. Museum for Contemporary Art in Ghent,