Fear death by water |
By Ermanno Rivetti | The Art Newspaper | 29 May 2013
Fear death by water
By Ermanno Rivetti.
Mother and child experience Directions 2005-2013
Mohammed Kazem's claustrophobic 360-degree sound and video
installation, Directions 2005-2013, in the United Arab Emirates pavilion, creates a powerful
cocktail of dread and desolation by transporting the viewer to the middle of the ocean, with no
land in sight. The sheer physicality of the experience is almost hard to bear, as the
combination of a stable viewing platform (at the centre of the installation) and the undulating
waters projected all around it provoke an almost instant sense of nausea. At once
psychologically harrowing and physically trying—the young child in the photo seemed
oblivious to all this—the installation is a must see, even if your sea legs are not what they
used to be.
By stripping this terrifying seascape of any geographical reference and replacing it with a simple set of
GPS coordinates that appear on the floor of the viewing platform, Kazem symbolically breaks down
artificial geopolitical borders, at least that is the official reading of his work. However, the sheer sense
of terror, the loneliness and the fear, seem to stem from somewhere deeper, perhaps an incident that
happened some years ago, when Kazem fell overboard during a fishing trip with friends and was
temporarily lost at sea. Geographical boundaries may be dispensable, but Kazem's use of GPS
coordinates, on which the viewer symbolically stands, stems from a very real need to be “located”.
The work is a full-scale and complete version of a project that Kazem first presented at the 2003
Sharjah Biennial and then at the 2006 Singapore Biennial.