WIRE 400: Khaled Kaddal
Khaled Kaddal - The Sky Is High But Not For Everyone, 2017 [film still, courtesy of the artist] Khaled Kaddal The Mosaic Rooms, London, UK
2017 not only marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution, but also of the Balfour Declaration, an invisible revolution consisting of a single paragraph. Authored by Arthur James Balfour in a letter to Walter Rothschild, it outlined a law permitting the settlement of the Jewish people in British mandate Palestine. UK based artist Judy Price offers critical insight into the repercussions of this declaration at her solo show, exhibited at London’s Mosaic Rooms until 18 June. Called Still, it examines the impact of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinian people, painting a refracted portrait of the troubled region through an amalgam of video works, photographs and art objects.
Though sound plays a relatively minor role in her Still show, she invited her friend, the Alexandrian sound artist Khaled Kaddal, to perform during its run. A former activist and veteran of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, Kaddal began with [Code03], a piece of condensed panic that interrogated the harmonic dissonance prevalent in alternating tones of a police siren. Differing from country to country, these tones can evoke contrasting associations in the listener depending on whether you think of authority as friend or foe. A large video projection made this connection literal with flashing reds and blues, which were soon followed by dynamic visual noise. Coupled with close-miked breathing, courtesy of a doctored Soviet gas mask, Kaddal succeeded in emphasising the claustrophobic nature of protests, albeit in a way that borders on noise performance cliche: a dark room, glitchy visuals, intense atmosphere.
The second set The Sky Is High But Not For Everyone elaborated on these ideas, but drew its inspiration directly from the Price exhibition hosting his performance. The pace dropped and the screen contracted to a letterbox view of the sky. Distant drones, slowly ascending in volume, purported to a feeling of oncoming dread. The stark setting recalled Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust Tower in Berlin and thoughts inevitably turned to mechanisms of warfare.
While Kaddal’s artificial containment is partially influenced by his friend’s experiences of the civil war in Lebanon, it also stands as a metaphor for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, with the sky acting as a de facto symbol of freedom. Indeed, Kaddal wanted to focus on the human side of these tensions and, following the concert, he noted that his interests lie in “post-traumatic growth and how conflict sometimes has a positive impact on individuals”.
The most memorable symbol that appears in both The Sky Is High and a Price photograph called Quarries Of Wandering Form is a tree. Whereas the purpose of Kaddal’s tree is to generate perspective and lure the listener out from the relative security of the bunker, Price’s battered olive tree is a token of defiance, both against the pollution enforced on it by a neighbouring quarry and the abstract geopolitical forces that conspire to control the land in which its roots are set.
These concepts carry an intriguing weight, yet the Still exhibition and Kaddal’s response to it are being eclipsed by the larger art world’s centenary-driven nostalgia for the Russian Revolution. Well, the latter’s an easy sell, with many visually rich materials on offer, and does not implicate the British Empire in any explicit way. However, this timely institutional enthusiasm for the Red Menace suggests that ongoing revolutions, such as the Arab Spring, the historical impact of which is yet to be determined, are being culturally marginalised in favour of the readily romanticised revolutions of a distant past.
Ilia Rogatchevski Originally published by The Wire, May 2017
