Lawrie Shabibi is delighted to announce the first-ever solo exhibition for artist, architect and researcher Dima Srouji titled Charts for a Resurrection, set to open on 7 May 2024.
Srouji’s work lies in the expanded context of interdisciplinary research projects. It acts as a form of political commentary and as a place-making or un-making tool. Srouji collaborates closely with archaeologists, anthropologists, glass blowers and sound designers to develop her architectural projects, installations, product designs, and writing. Working across a diverse range of media including glass, text, archival materials, maps, and film, Srouji questions ideas of identity and globalisation through historic strata and space, in connection to the spirit of a place and displacement. Interested in the ground, objects, displacement, restitution, forgeries, and living archives, Srouji looks for potential ruptures in the ground where imaginary liberation is possible.
The exhibition is conceived as two distinct spaces, the larger terrain and the more intimate chapel, comprising installations and archival prints that intertwine historical artefacts with imaginary archaeological sites.
In the larger space, stone carved windows with coloured glass inlays imagine future archaeological monuments in the Palestinian landscape constructed with the traditional technique of Qamariya windows, often found in mosques and churches in Palestine, Yemen, and Egypt.
Two nine square grid installations mirror one another as the surface of the ground and the other as the subterranean space beneath it. The wall-mounted grid reveals partially excavated glass vessels as if an excavation is underway. The floor grid reveal complex strata including structures from the past, present and future of Palestine. Some include familiar structures such as the plans for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Dome of the Rock and a vision of how an archaeological site in Palestine might appear in 300 years.
A series of prints on aluminum, Maternal Labour celebrates the real women often labeled as “basket girls” who were hired by western institutions in the 20th century to excavate the land that they owned and cultivated for centuries to extract valuable artefacts that were then displaced.
The more intimate darkened, apsed space evokes a chapel, adorned with floating replicas of archeological vessels that were historically used as gifts to the dead for their afterlives. Here, amidst the unfolding tragedy in Palestine, the chapel serves as a sanctuary for mourning and meditation, fostering healing and envisioning the afterlives of the departed while imagining the future of a liberated Palestine through its fictional archaeological artefacts.
