false dawn
false dawn
SULAIMAN MAJALI
GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
PROJECT SPACE
24 April – 10 May 2020
false dawn invokes Scheherazade from the folktale ‘1001 Nights’ and imagines her as a radical disruptor who maps and obstructs the colonial matrix. In telling stories to survive a tyrant who would kill her at dawn, Scheherazade ensures her survival by pausing each tale and continuing the following evening.
Taking its name from a zodiacal light visible on the horizon before dawn, the exhibition proposes the tales – subsumed by orientalism and encountered through a diasporic optic – as a vehicle for spatial and temporal disruption. false dawn takes creasing and folding as modes of rupture, through a living Scheherezade who performs collapse within the apparatus of disposability and maps divergence as a weapon to be deployed in the house of an enduring imperial imaginary.
Sulaïman Majali lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Majali is an artist and writer who interrogates the spatiotemporal logics of the enduring colonial and subsequent incarcerations of histories and their futures. The work considers its contexts as an age of anxiety, crises, collapse and multiplicities and looks through a diasporic optic to poetic strategies for disruption and divergent modes of remembering.
Their upcoming solo exhibition Saracen go home opens 31st January 2020, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. Group exhibitions and events include something vague and irrational, with Ray Camara, Celine Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2019). LUX Scotland and David Dale Gallery screening programme, Glasgow (2019).assembly of the poets, a reading as part of EARTH HOLD for Qalandiya International Biennial (2018). Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017). 8th Cairo Video Festival, Cairo, Egypt (2017). this scattering of minds; like seeds, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna/Transmission Gallery. as if we were strangers; that strangeness was ours, CCA Glasgow. Dark Speculative Futurity and the Rise of Neo-Nationalism (The Search for New Dimensions), Tohu Magazine conference, Jaffa, Palestine (2017). On The Edge of a Continent, Glasgow International (2016).
