Under Construction Part II: Deconstruction/Reconstruction: Farhad Ahrarnia | Mounir Fatmi | Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim | Nadia Kaabi-Linke I Yazan Khalili I Driss Ouadahi | Larissa Sansour

Apartheid Monochromes (2017) is a set of painted canvases that highlight the perversion of mandatory state-issued ID cards and their bearing on the everyday lives of Palestinians. Introduced by Israel in 1949 the ID cards are classified into different colours that depend on the identity of their holder – itself based on a complex set of rules around birthplace and/or residence. Hence the colour of an ID card very much determines the political, economic and social life of its holder; a low-tech means of dividing and monitoring enforced by the Israeli regime. The canvases reference Yves Klein’s monochromes and come in the various exact colours of the ID cards bringing into focus divisions of identity, race, borders and citizenship.

Archaeology in Absentia is a sculptural series of fifteen bronze munition replicas modelled on a small Cold War Russian nuclear bomb. Engraved on a disc inside each capsule are the coordinates, longitude and latitude, to a deposit of hand-painted porcelain plates with folkloric patterns buried in Palestine. With the porcelain itself absent from the installation, the bomb shells and the references they hold represent the archaeological artefacts in absentia. The coordinates of each porcelain deposit are established during a real-life entombment performance taking place in Palestine. Carrying the iconic keffiyeh pattern, these plates are deposited for future archaeologists to excavate. Once unearthed, they are meant to interfere with current versions of history and in effect cause a historical intervention.

Driss Ouadahi’s Inside Zenith (2014) is modelled on impressions from photographs taken during his travels, meshing them with images from his memory to create a collage of different buildings and spaces, constructing a new, fantastical urban structure each time. Inside Zenith is really an impossible place to inhabit - zenith refers to an imaginary point in the celestial sphere directly above a particular location, which one cannot get inside. Zenith also suggests success or power and is therefore a rather appropriate word to define Dubai, its exponential growth and seemingly limitless ambition.

Scorched Earth (2018) by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, a floor sculpture made of stoneware slabs water cut using a computer-controlled procedure, traces the course of the soil and weed-filled cracks between cobblestones on the Neumarkt in Dresden. On this site corpses were gathered the day after the firestorms caused by two nights of raids by British and American bombers, devastating the city in February 1945, killing twenty thousand. The cracks in the ground - the result of the intense heat.