ATHR is pleased to announce Sultan bin Fahad’s latest solo: “GwPow!” (Gulf War Prisoners of War). Curated by the artist’s studio, the exhibition is set to open to the public on the 6th of March, 2024.
The artworks in “GwPow!” explore how children are forced by war into things they shouldn’t have to experience by juxtaposing that childhood innocence with the brutality of conflict. Through a series of paintings, a collection called “Power Ups,” Sultan distills motifs from the culture those children should have been enjoying: video games, comic books, and cartoons of superheroes, and superimposes them on graphics of conflict and wars. The paintings are also accompanied by a collection of installations and sculptures consisting of found war artifacts decorated and arranged in childish manner. This serves to emphasize the innocent aspects of the work in literally embracing the dressings of the Gulf War with a youthful embrace of textures and detail. Similarly does this apply to the myriad found objects sourced for the exhibition, accumulating a bevy of toys, locker boxes, statuettes, colorful pillowcases, photographs, netting, and tools to display the relative mundanity of the wartime day to day, while other routine items have been transformed through brilliant beads and vibrant yarn wefts to emphasize the dissonance of joyful innocence and clinical battle sadly crisscrossing.
“The work constructs canvas collages to interrogate conflicts of identity, fighting and surviving at an age when you should be free to explore and play, contrasting the recreation of new media with its capacity for propagating harrowing events to that effect.” – Sultan bin Fahad
The exhibition will remain open to the public until May 2024.
Press release from ATHR
Image: Sultan bin Fahad. Call Me Back. 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and ATHR
