Hole, Landscape, Parcel

Overview

Images migrate, often without much luggage. Take this view of a FedEx package, which has travelled far further than the parcel itself – the box never arrived at its destination. The photograph (of another photograph) shows a souvenir model of a Yemeni palace and a computer printer creeping out of the cardboard box, shot like a deer in headlights, cornered and floored. The image becomes the package, delivered to your front door. Or this hole in the ground: if the image were in a Texan newspaper, the hole would tunnel through to another, lawless place.

What is its promise here? In the same week, a similar icon appeared on the cover of a German Donald Duck magazine and in a newspaper photo of a spectacular bank break-in via an excavated tunnel.

Both are distant relatives of a trope found throughout European art history, most often associated with a tale central to the Old Testament and the Qur’an in which Joseph/Yusuf was thrown into a cistern and sold by his brothers to slave dealers, who took him from Palestine to Egypt.

This story was a popular topic in paintings and tapestries of the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, but now subterranean border crossings are found worldwide. Here, descending from a harlequin pattern, the cavity in the floor will lead to another kingdom, if not a promised landscape.


2013

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 11

Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation