We're pleased to announce that Hamra Abbas’s Please Do Not Step: Loss of a Magnificent Story is featured in the group exhibition Still, Life! Mourning, Meaning, Mending, showing at 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The marble slabs of Abbas’s Please Do Not Step: Loss of a Magnificent Story are inscribed with text, resembling a lengthy tombstone, yet the form of the sculpture and the writings tell tales of traveling across geographic, cultural, and temporal space. Shaped like a magic carpet, the work pays homage to the Islamic Dastangoi tradition of storytelling, and makes references to a flying carpet, its potential transformation into an airplane, and to what Abbas describes as “the scattering of migrants around the world’s oceans."
Still, Life! Mourning, Meaning, Mending explores how contemporary art offers solace and insight, meaning and purpose. The collective experience of time warping and wrinkling during recent periods of uncertainty and vulnerability is reflected in works that highlight and celebrate the notion of the glitch, suggesting new pathways to a future in which time itself might be understood and experienced in novel ways.
