Il MIT List Visual Arts Center ospita fino ai primi di settembre la mostra personale di Azza El Siddique. La mostra segna la 25a edizione della serie di mostre List Projects e presenterà una nuova installazione commissionata all'artista.
Azza El Siddique (b. 1984; lives in New Haven, CT) is known for room-sized sculptural environments that take up the related themes of entropy, impermanence, and mortality. Her works engage multiple senses, and feature materials that are recast by time and elemental forces, like water, light, and heat. In past works, she has outfitted austere metal constructions with heat lamps that diffuse scents like sandalwood, and slow drip irrigation systems that erode sculptures in unfired clay. These aromas and materials evoke both Islamic mortuary rituals and the artist’s sensorial recollections of her adolescence in a Sudanese community in Canada. Recently, El Siddique has become drawn to the cultural and economic significance of scent in ancient Nubia and the neighboring Egyptian Empire, investigating the related histories and myths that endure in Sudanese culture.
For her first museum solo exhibition, El Siddique debuts In the place of annihilation, where all the past was present and returned transformed (2022), a site-specific installation that uncovers the personal, ancient, and colonial narratives of the fragrances used in bukhoor. Ubiquitous in Sudanese and diasporic Sudanese households, this incense is a blend of sandalwood chips, aromatic resins, and European perfumes made for export to North African markets, all bound together with sugar. In El Siddique’s installation, bukhoor incense cast into the form of waterlily blossoms is incrementally heated, permeating the gallery with scent and eventually melting until only a sticky residue remains. The installation’s steel architecture is based on the floorplan of a temple dedicated to the shape-and gender-shifting ancient Nubian god of incense, Dedwen, and houses drawings welded on steel panels as well as a two-channel video mapping the chemical compounds of bukhoor’s various ingredients. The video’s 3-D scans of eerily floating mounds of frankincense and other fragrant resins allude to the historical trade networks of these aromatics, and their use in religious ceremonies that doubled as displays of political power.
El Siddique likens the slowly unfolding events in her works to the subjective and unstable production of historical narratives and personal recollections. The work’s atmospheric evocations of the long, multilayered histories of ancient sites, precious resins, and traditions highlight how, in the artist’s words, “lineage and inheritance keep moving through systems” that are re-formed with the passage of time.
List Projects 25: Azza El Siddique is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.
Azza El Siddique (b. 1984 Khartoum, Sudan) lives and works in New Haven, CT. Previous solo exhibitions include Begin in smoke, end in ashes, Helena Anrather, New York; let me hear you sweat, Cooper Cole, Toronto, ON; Concave Conflux Convex, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto; Lattice be Transparent, 8eleven, Toronto. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at MOCA Toronto; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Toronto; Shin Gallery, New York; Green Hall Gallery, New Haven; Towards, Miami; and Parisian Laundry, Miami. El Siddique received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014. She was a Skowhegan resident in 2019.
