Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, is pleased to present Molding Anew, Rand Abdul Jabbar‘s (b. 1990, Baghdad) first solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition builds on her recent commission for Desert X Alula, where myths are born of mud and desire (2024), staging an interplay between narrative and sculpture to explore myth-making as a method of preservation and transformation. Molding Anew reflects Abdul Jabbar’s process of arriving at her mode of artistic expression, weaving ancient Mesopotamian mythology with contemporary narratives and drawing on multiple mediums to reclaim, preserve, and transform the cultural legacy of her motherland by bringing it to life anew.
The design and organization of the exhibition are grounded on notions of seriality and multiplicity, inherent qualities in the work. The exhibition opens with Tracing Origins (2022), a series of foil imprints of miniature ceramic reliefs collected from Iraq by the artist’s mother. The transplanted palms and cultural motifs served as objects of childhood play and imagination, latent with meaning as they helped her construct an image of a home that was inaccessible to her, establishing her vocation of intertwining object, memory, and place.
Abdul Jabbar’s work slices through thousands of years of history to reveal the often dormant narratives that resurface over time. For someone whose practice collapses time, working with clay is particularly significant because of its malleability, memory, and links to material culture and history. The exhibition will feature twenty ceramic sculptures from her Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings (2019-ongoing) body of work, which was awarded the Richard Mille Art Prize in 2022. The existing works will be shown alongside thirty new sculptures produced for this exhibition, through which Abdul Jabbar highlights and expands on three sculptural groupings – fertility, eye idols, and crowns – symbolizing acts of living, seeing, and knowing. The representations of female figures and the palm tree compose her fertility series, gesturing at notions of birth, renewal, and abundance. Her eye idols, which recall artifacts exhumed from the ancient Mesopotamian Eye Temple at Tell Brak in 1937, hold the memory of all they have observed as they gaze out across the exhibition floor. Meanwhile, the crowns that she has molded represent for her the wisdom derived from the accumulated knowledge gathered from across the centuries.
The exhibition also features ليكن مذكوراً (may it be remembered) (2023), a work in which Abdul Jabbar draws on her research into the ancient city of Hatra to set the stage for describing our cyclical and multilayered relationship to land and its legacies of remembrance. Revealing glimpses into seismic moments and events that shaped the place into being, the nine mud sculptures that comprise that series serve as dual agents, performing as witnesses of history and actors within it.
From this expansive vocabulary of sculptural objects emerges her latest series, Alphabet (2024), in which she presents the iconography of her forms as an evolving language of signs and symbols. She has produced five varying compositions printed on linen using eighty individual blocks, each correlating to one of her sculptures. The panels correspond to the five chapters of the narrative text she wrote to accompany where myths are born of mud and desire, which also served as the central organizing narrative for this exhibition. One may perceive Abdul Jabbar’s body of work unfolded into these five chapters, but also begin to form new readings as they are traversed.
Facing this vast set of protagonists, Inanna’s Descent (2020-2024), a diptych carved in yellow limestone, stands as an ode to wayfinding and the search for belonging; for an arrival home—a sentiment that reverberates in every corner of the gallery.
Curated by Meitha Almazrooei
Exhibition Designed by Alejandro Stein
Press release from Lawrie Shabibi
Image: Rand Abul Jabbar. Installation view of Molding Anew at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai, 2024. Photography by Ismail Noor of Seeing Things. Image courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi
