Photo by Nicolas Wefers
The Blue Ink Pocket, and. 2022
Video work
Duration: approx. 11 Min.
Language: Arabic and with english subtitles.
Editor and camera operator: Issac Lythgoe
Consulting editor: Mary Jirmanus Saba
Sound mix : Ernst Karel
Colorist: Belal Hibri
Duration: approx. 11 Min.
Language: Arabic and with english subtitles.
Editor and camera operator: Issac Lythgoe
Consulting editor: Mary Jirmanus Saba
Sound mix : Ernst Karel
Colorist: Belal Hibri
The village artist drew copies of himself with complicated stories that he shared in the galleries from around the world, since he couldn't travel with his duplicates because of the migration of furniture, friends, and trees. This was both an artistic style and his position towards the politics that obstruct the movement of the artist with his work and his western audience. He had a group of drawings of the strongest passports from around the world that he accomplished with cheap paints on cigarette boxes. He formed with each story a duplicate of himself where he placed a passport in the pocket of the drawn shirt. This copy of “The Blue Ink Pocket” is the only one we possess.
Aside from an old letter that the artist wrote in 2022 for a collective he joined, nothing remains except the signature and the phrase “Good luck.” The words were consumed by the farm's larvae in the basement. But it's possible for you to see the traces of the pen's power on the back of the paper, and you read:
When I joined art residencies, they both destroyed the chains of traditional academic training that I had been through at the Institute of Fine Arts.
With Sada, I was introduced to video and other experimental forms. In Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, I decided to return to painting, in a way critical to the traditional forms. I stopped drawing and painting for years before joining the artistic group in Beirut. All because the person who had taught me painting...here a piece of the text is incomprehensible.
I realized that painting could bring me to courtroom drawings, which are rapidly accomplished, paintings that double as tools of witness, and for this reason sometimes the outlines connect and sometimes they do not.
Don’t you see this canvas as a shroud or a curtain that covers the painting-in-hiding.
The painting’s wood contains the tree’s voice, cast out like me from far off forests.
Sometimes I work directly without use of wood or an outer frame, so it gives freedom to the canvas to take a ghost shape. Painting and drawing contain a lot of baggage, but this is also its power. This medium fits the life of the immigrant, since three exhibitions fit in one piece of luggage.
Good Luck Ali Eyal
We apologize for only delivering this work now... We couldn’t bear to be separated from it so soon after its return.
We stumbled upon the left ear inside the bag of rice.
We retrieved the painting of the head from side the abandoned storage.
The right year from under the stairs.
The shoulders and the hands we found inside the jacket
And we found the feet stuffed inside the cotton.