ALA TARAF LISAN AL’ARD
Exhibited as part of Akkaz Collective’s research project, Ala Taraf Lisan Al’Arth is a visual documentation through the lens of Aziz Motawa capturing the last eight years of his treks along the Doha and Sulaibikhat coastal areas and their interwoven narratives of industry and toxicity that play out in these derelict marshy stretches of Kuwait. Oscillating between dream-like, wanton vignettes and the industrialized corporeality of human intervention, this visual project foregrounds the six East to West water desalination plants and outpours along the northern coastal lines of Kuwait, which frame the abandoned American military camp, and geographic triangulation of the now demolished Entertainment City theme park, Doha’s nature reserve, and the newly constructed causeway that bridges the densely populated city to this swampy, neglected geography.
Aziz’s visuals embody a liminality—a third space—where the natural, industrial, and personal all congeal in the sump and pit of the sewage outpours that populate this geography of mudflats. There is a permeability of boundaries throughout these visuals of concrete, wire, and mudflats that unify these realms in the ebb and flow of the area’s intertidal zones. What remains here is a culmination of fragmented ideas on life and how it settles, how it self-destructs, and how it adapts taken from the perspective of animals native to the mudflats.
Exhibited as part of Akkaz Collective’s research project, Ala Taraf Lisan Al’Arth is a visual documentation through the lens of Aziz Motawa capturing the last eight years of his treks along the Doha and Sulaibikhat coastal areas and their interwoven narratives of industry and toxicity that play out in these derelict marshy stretches of Kuwait. Oscillating between dream-like, wanton vignettes and the industrialized corporeality of human intervention, this visual project foregrounds the six East to West water desalination plants and outpours along the northern coastal lines of Kuwait, which frame the abandoned American military camp, and geographic triangulation of the now demolished Entertainment City theme park, Doha’s nature reserve, and the newly constructed causeway that bridges the densely populated city to this swampy, neglected geography.
Aziz’s visuals embody a liminality—a third space—where the natural, industrial, and personal all congeal in the sump and pit of the sewage outpours that populate this geography of mudflats. There is a permeability of boundaries throughout these visuals of concrete, wire, and mudflats that unify these realms in the ebb and flow of the area’s intertidal zones. What remains here is a culmination of fragmented ideas on life and how it settles, how it self-destructs, and how it adapts taken from the perspective of animals native to the mudflats.
Ala Taraf Lisan Al’Ard
Project by Aziz Motawa
Designed by Hamad Al Mujeem
2023
Project by Aziz Motawa
Designed by Hamad Al Mujeem
2023
]
