Artwork

Magnetism (2012)
Diasec mounted LightJet print on Kodak Premier paper
90 x 120 x 4 cm

“When my grandfathers spoke to me as a child about their experience of Hajj, they told me of the physical attraction they felt towards the Ka‘bah, that they felt drawn to it by an almost magnetic pull.” In the installation, Ahmed Mater has evoked that feeling by using tens of thousands of iron filings placed within the magnetic fields of two magnets, only the upper one of which is visible. For Mater, “Magnetism” also conveys one of the essential elements of Hajj, that all Muslims are considered the same in the eyes of God whether rich, poor, young or old. As such the iron filings represent a unified body of pilgrims all of whom are similarly attracted to the Ka‘bah as the centre of their world.

Ahmed Mater’s black cuboid magnet is a small simulacrum of the black-draped Ka‘bah, the “Cube”, the central element of the Meccan rites. His circumambulating whirl of metallic filings mirrors in miniature the concentric tawaf of the pilgrims, their sevenfold circling of the Ka‘bah. Al-Bayt al-‘Atiq, the Ancient House, to give the Ka‘bah another of its names, is ancient – indeed archetypal – in more than one way. The cube is the primary building-block, and the most basic form of a built structure. And the Cube, the Ka‘bah, is also Bayt Allah, the House of the One God: it was built by Abraham, the first monotheist, or in some accounts by the first man, Adam. To this day, and beyond, the Ka‘bah is a focal point of atonement and expiation.

 

Ahmed Mater’s “Magnetism” gives us more than simple simulacra of that Ancient House of God. His counterpoint of square and circle, whorl and cube, of black and white, light and dark, places the primal elements of form and tone in dynamic equipoise.

Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua

 

 

 

location: “Advance and retreat of globalization” MAIN EXHIBITION,Macao Museum of Art
16/07/2021~17/10/2021