Alia Hamaoui has never been inside Beirut’s Chamoun Stadium, but it has lived constantly in her imagination. Growing up near the stadium, the sounds of the roaring crowd gave her a sense of the vastness that lay within. For Hamaoui, the story of the stadium reflects the 20th century history of Lebanon. Built in 1957 as an optimistic symbol of a modernist and independent future, it was destroyed by Israeli bombing in 1982, then restored and brought back into use in 1997, only to be damaged in the 2020 explosion. It now lies partly in ruin, in a state of limbo waiting for what the future holds and what it might become. The stadium, as a site of potential, as the container of histories which are yet to become new futures, is where Hamaoui locates her work. More specifically, she recreates the imagined lockers of the stadium and inhabits them with invented artefacts derived from Lebanon’s past and a
future yet to happen. Her objects reference those found in the national museums and critique what she sees as the institutional privilege the museums give to the Phoenician story, promoting this as Lebanon’s true origin thereby marginalising other narratives.
Hamaoui’s objects are worn on the body: shoulder armour, sheaths of daggers, body protection, and they blur the boundary between body, architecture and artefact. Through these anthropomorphic pieces, histories are entwined into the folded space between human and material, memories that people carry, and ancient objects are wrapped into each other and into the physical space of the stadium - the ruin with the potential to become something.
This question of where the past exists and how it is traced is explored in Amba Sayal-Bennett’s wall-mounted sculptural pieces. They form part of her larger body of work, which looks at colonial botany and processes of extraction. One component of this is the story of Sayal-Bennett’s late grandmother who was displaced from the northern Indian state of Punjab to the UK during the Partition of India following independence from British rule. Displacement, its inherited memories and traumas are reflected in the practices of colonial botany, where plant species and seeds are extracted from their indigenous context and relocated to new environments, where they survive in new and adapted forms or die. Sayal-Bennett tells the story of 70,000 rubber seeds stolen by the British government from Brazil, brought back to Kew Gardens, then sent on to the colonies for cultivation. The Indian climate and soil refused to take the seeds, which Sayal-Bennett describes as an insurgent infrastructure, refusing to comply with the colonial project.
Acts of resistance, of writing one’s own displaced present and imagining one’s own relocated future are central to Sayal-Bennett’s sculptural pieces, in which ornamentation and the floral motif oppose the hegemonic functionalist histories of European Modernism. The seed carries a history and also the potential for a new future, and Sayal-Bennett’s pieces imagine the plant’s new growth - sometimes organic, or modular, or anarchic. These are diasporic futures that have no previous template and are being made anew.
But what are diasporic histories, and where will diasporic futures go from here? Raheel Khan didn’t see or hear but, as a boy, he felt new forms of agency and insurgency through the customised sound-system of his older brother’s car. The expression of one’s post-millenium presence in the English midlands is what he felt, and what first existed as bass thumping
through his body and the machinery of the car, later became his project of exploring black and brown bodies existing within music, local policy and economies.
Behind the wall of the two subwoofers he’s built and installed, Khan introduces a backdrop of Muslim prayer mats sourced from charity shops across East London. Embodying various histories of prayer, devotion and communal gathering, Khan extracts what is audible from recordings of the same area, pushing the remainder of rhythmic bass through the stacked
subwoofers, adapting the histories of the prayer mat into the acoustic but also the physical. He asks, where does the mystical reside; between the everyday practice in areas of diasporic worship and the spaces that are fashioned for it, and the memories that reside in and are felt deep inside the body. As machines fade in and out of our environment, Khan seeks out
the new acoustic, of making new worlds and imagining new futures. ‘We hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal’ wrote Water Benjamin in 1933, pointing to the mysterious and hidden processes between thought and action and to the unconscious ways in which the human and material worlds interact.
The collection of works brought together in this exhibition unravel the myriad ways in which the colonial past is experienced, contained, preserved and transmitted,showing how the diasporic subject is making new futures for itself. Through these works, this diasporic subject is insurgent, refusing the categories placed on it and instead finding new ways, expansive,
mysterious, subconscious ways, to articulate its own histories and imagine its own futures.
ABOUT SHAHED SALEEM:
Shahed Saleem is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Cities at Westminster
University where he leads a BA Design and MArch Dissertation studio. His particular research and practice interests are in the architecture of migrant and diasporic communities, and in particular their relationship to heritage, belonging and nationhood. Saleem was commissioned by English Heritage to research and write the architectural and social history of the British Mosque, published by Historic England in 2018. He continues to research, write and lecture extensively. Saleem founded East London architectural practice Makespace in the early 2000s through which he has worked with a range of clients including faith communities in designing and delivering places of worship. He was invited to co-curate the V&A pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2021), and collaborated in the design of a public installation at the Folkestone Triennial (2021) and he continues to develop public art work. His design work has been nominated for the V&A Jameel Prize (2013) and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2016) and his research work won a RIBA President’s Medal for Research commendation (2020) and was nominated for the Historic England Angel Award and the SAHGB Colvin Prize (2019).
