Push, pull, resist. These forms of contact - both historic and contemporary – have long shaped cultural identities and exchanges. In Between Hands and Metal, a collection of works consider the many ways in which colonial histories are remembered and experienced in our present; the contemporary artists, how younger generations - often practicing in or between diasporas - are constructing new, alternative futures.
Amba Sayal-Bennett’s practice explores imperial botany, exposing the entanglements of cultivation and colonisation through the extraction, imposition, and displacement of plants. At Palmer, they present their early investigations into rubber, a commodity once so highly demanded its value surpassed that of silver. In a mission facilitated by the British government, Henry Wickham stole and trafficked 70,000 rubber seeds from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in 1876. Transported to Kew Gardens, south of the gallery in London, they were then dispersed to British colonies for cultivation. Its plural uses and potential for profit led to its proliferation across the globe - yet the soil in India refused to take the seeds, which the artist puts forward as a form of environmental resistance to the colonial project.
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Carefully placed on white-painted brick, these seed templates sometimes blend into their surrounds, speaking to how people, like plants, are often assimilated into national landscapes. Born and based in London - the artist’s grandmother was displaced from the northern state of Punjab in the Partition that followed independence - they exhibit as often in India, and major institutions across the SWANA region.
Familiars of indigo+madder, one of the city’s diasporic galleries, may be drawn to Sayal-Bennett’s wall-mounted, 3D-printed sculptures. Palmer presents a triptych of works-in-progress of PLA plastic; future experimentations may see them re-emerge dipped in liquid rubber. Combining floral ornamentation and functionalist European Modernist architecture, they also bear a great resemblance to globalised ‘African masks’, troubling the more segregated narratives of cultural production offered in concurrent exhibitions on view the capital, like the V&A’s Tropical Modernism.
Machine-cut and manufactured, these sculptural works blur the boundaries between non-/human making and forms. Sharing in this ambiguity - and interest in modernist architecture - is AliaHamaoui, initiator of Between Hands and Metal, and bringer-on-board of her fellow artists.
Here, Hamaoui pulls out fragments of Beirut’s Chamoun Stadium, which loomed over her childhood home in Lebanon, in a series of wall-mounted installations. Built in 1957, twice ruined - by Israeli bombing in 1982, and the explosion in 2020 - and once reconstructed in the interim, its ruins reflect the country’s twentieth century history.
Having never entered the space, Hamaoui is free to imagine and invent artefacts that could be housed inside. Symbols of the Jeux de la Francophonie, an Olympic-style multi-sport event held in French-speaking nations and former colonies of France from 1989, sit alongside those of ancient Phoenician civilisations, objects now platformed in the country’s national museums.
The artist takes critical aim of the institutional privileging of ‘the Phoenician story’, evidence of an ongoing colonisation of national consciousness. First fetishised by the French, Lebanon’s origin story was internalised and appropriated as a mark of privilege, perhaps connecting with the status of Parsi patronage and Persian Zoroastrian Revivalism in Mumbai.
Hamaoui’s focus is more intimate, creating settings of contrast in scale and subject. Her little lockers are backed with photographs of the stadium in Beirut, printed on textiles, and punctured like Chesterfield headboards, which recall the bedroom and home. Phoenician daggers, often misinterpreted through Western/European perspectives as symbols of violence, are scattered in her domestic scenes.
Bringing together the public and private creates space for conversations around gender. Large-scale locker rooms playfully subvert the masculine connotations of these spaces; she populates them with sporting armours placed to resemble women’s bodies, from fleshy, pink-coloured shoulder pads, to uterus-like ceramic axes.
Raheel Khan’s work is anchored in more fraternal relations, specifically the soundtrack of his childhood in Nottingham in the backseats of his brother’s car. Exploring the prevalence of dubstep music in diasporic communities - a form of ‘colonialism through sound’ - Khan’s work investigates the intersections of class and migration.
From the Midlands, to more recent commissions in Manchester with Counterpoints Arts, Khan moves to London, recording on the streets outside London’s mosques. Contrary to stereotypes, we hear not calls to prayer but passing cars; pushed through a subwoofer, the audio moves to abstraction, speaking to the present absences in representations of these communities today.
The audio is housed in a construct shaped like a supercar grille, recalling the origins of Khan’s practice, the passing traffic of this piece, and the modernist references of the works it stands between. Behind Khan’s block hang a collection of mass-produced Islamic prayer mats, found from a charity shop near the mosque; ghosts in the space, which haunt with the drone of the audio.
All three artists here engage with the ready-made. Simultaneously, their work, following writer Shahed Saleem, speaks to ‘diasporic futures that have no previous template and are being made anew’. Saleem’s words bear more relevance to the exhibition than the titular reference to Walter Benjamin, which might mislead the visitor into thinking this a show of political or philosophical performativity. Not so; Between Hands and Metal is the result of close collaboration with and between its artists, two of whom (Hamaoui, Sayal Bennett) are also founders of Collective Ending HQ, a collaboratively-run studio and gallery complex in Deptford, South East London.
The considered curation of this exhibition bears great promise for the new Palmer Gallery’s future, as they look to work more closely with diasporic communities near Edgware Road. Strong relations with its neighbours, established institutions like the Showroom and Lisson Gallery (the latter of which also supported Khan’s recent exhibition at the The Bomb Factory Art Foundation in Marylebone) will only better serve those in the pull of Central West London too.
