Sama Alshaibi
and Michael Fadel:
Model of Motions

form & concept | June 2021

Model of Motions is a multimedia artw0rk that carries visitors to historic and futuristic contexts from the Middle East to Northern Africa, linking the displacement caused by the Silk Road to today’s refugee crises across the globe. The installation is an official satellite show of the CURRENTS New Media Festival 2021, and its appearance at form & concept closely follows the announcement of Alshaibi’s 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Model of Motions features Alshaibi and Fadel’s collaborative piece Swell, a kinetic sculpture comprising a wooden boat form, loose gypsum sand and a vintage anchor. Swell’s undulating motion, made possible through two mechanical elements at the base of the boat and within the hull, slowly tips the sand onto the floor of the gallery. This literal and metaphorical jetsam falls atop a snaked anchor with a long chain. Its coiled and sinuous path evokes intertwining times, places and people. The accompanying video features a protagonist fruitlessly charting a course by rowboat in an arid desert.

“We wanted to foreground the elasticity of time itself, and the cyclical nature of our social histories in relationship to ecological demise,” says Alshaibi. “Both (Fadel and I) were born in Middle Eastern countries that we were uprooted from due to war, and whose contemporary environmental, social and political stability teeter on the edge of collapse. In our respective practices, we speak to the alienation of the physical and psychic conditions of that experience through a spare yet emotive framework. It was a natural evolution for us to create a project that alludes to the historic movement of goods and peoples across physical and metaphorical place.”

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