In the Head's Dusk
Saw Center, Ottawa, December 1, 2022 - March 4, 2023.
Curated by Amin Alsaden.
In his first solo exhibition in Canada, Eyal presents a constellation of new and existing works, including paintings, videos and sculptural installations, that shed light on how Iraq’s turmoil captures dynamics that overtly or surreptitiously shape our current global reality. On the twentieth anniversary of the invasion—one of the most flagrant examples of neo-colonialism in recent history—his work raises questions about the immense cost of the world’s voracious appetite for oil. The price includes an unspeakable toll in human lives, planetary environmental degradation, and dispossession, displacement and decimation of entire cultural traditions. Although based on personal experience, the artist’s work also elucidates how the occupation of Iraq points to ideological rivalries between capitalism and other worldviews, as well as imperialism’s endless wars, the repercussions of which go far beyond Southwest Asia (or the “Middle East”), often the casualty of incessant Western military adventures.
Through intense introspection, Eyal invokes the challenges of representing the unfathomable scale of the tragedies brought about by armed conflict, which obscure the more nuanced and tender aspects of the survivors’ lives. Poetry coexists with horror in his canvases, and an unsettling anxiety is evinced by the nonsensical logic, pervasive fragmentation and dense agglomerations found across his practice. The anatomical, an allegory for carnage, intermingles with the botanical, conjuring an alternative world of shadows, and the artist’s way of keeping difficult memories alive. Lodged deeply into the unconscious—in the head’s dusk, straddling that fertile zone between waking and sleep—his work is ultimately about perseverance, an insistence on bringing to public awareness narratives that have been concealed or suppressed. By giving agency to rebellious recollections, which refuse to be forgotten, Eyal deploys imagination as resistance.
Amin Alsaden
Other details were released from my eyebrow showing me the memory of the future. I watched the clouds. A cloud arrived from whatsapp Oil and ink on the bark of my tree
Despite the irritation of the lacrimal gland, they won. Senseless tears, cold tears. Due to facing the heat of burning wood from around the farm. Your sky is frozen tear. I don’t know the dimensions.