Shamsa — Nahla Tabbaa

Work About Contact

2022

Dried fruits on silk, recipe book, dried fruits in jars,

commissioned by Park Projects, Jameel Arts Centre,
curated by Lucas Morin, Dubai, UAE.

In the scorching summer of 2022 I was commissioned by Art Jameel for Park Projects, a new initiative which invited artists to respond to the communal space of the Arts Centre’s waterfront sculpture park in ways which questioned notions of nature and community. In my decade of living in the UAE, I recognised that this time of year in Dubai drew people out of the city, many individuals retreating to hibernate in cooler environments to escape the harsh weather.

There was an isolating yet communal fear of getting from point A to point B under the sun’s heat. Exploring the sun and its local relationship to time has always intrigued me and been a baseline for several of my past projects, so I was excited to build on that narrative with Shamsa.

Shamsa is a series of time-based interventions which explore the passage of time through the impact of the sun.

The outcomes were stained panels of silk, dried food and a book.

I envisioned the Shamsa book to read like an almanac of this time period.

It is organised by colour swatches I made to document the colours of the sky and water during sunrise and sunset at Art Jameel. The process felt familiar in a historical way, drawing on the romantic intentions of painters who sought to depict temporary landscapes. In Dubai’s urban and industrial environment, finding time to sit and study the sun’s colours was a rare treat. However, the irony of these rapid swatches, each a measure of 30 minutes, was that I was still chasing something which was fleeting, trying to capture and create tangible proof of its special yet momentary existence.

I collaborated with artist and designer Layan Attari who used these swatches to build a linear timeline and create pockets for colours from the fruit and vegetable dyes to live in alongside several recipes. Layan purposefully constructed the folds of the book to interact with the reader in the same intentionally slow and laborious way in which the project was carried out. Altogether, of the 150 copies of this book, 20 are limited editions which come wrapped in a silk cover with three small bags of salts, all stained by the same materials the collection itself mothers.