I Wish to Be Happy, I Want to Be Yellow gathers artists who maintain a visceral and intimate relationship with nature, highlighting the raw, emotive power of the natural world. It explores themes of disembodiment and re-embodiment,presenting nature as fluid and multiplicitous, merging with the human, the animal and sometimes the mechanical into a new unified form. This exhibition highlights nature’s imprint on both the earth and the body.
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, in his book The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, notes, “We are becoming fluid and many-sided. Without quite realising it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of the past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the “protean self” after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms.”
Artists blur temporal boundaries between presence and absence, fullness and lack, past and present, engaging in generative rites that foster creation, fertility, and renewal. Bodies morph, adapt, and redefine themselves, existing in states of transition and transformation; in an ongoing flux of becoming. They embody the power of attraction and interaction, functioning as entities that react and interact with their surroundings. Challenging the notion of “being in the world”, the artists use a variety of mediums and schemes to break free –
for a moment – from human existence.
The works incorporate ephemeral materials that manifest the impermanence and fluidity of natural forces—food, twigs, ants, flowers, leaves, and candle wax—transformed and integrated into installations, photographies, sculptures, assemblages, collages, textiles, papers and paintings. With an eclectic group
of artists, the exhibition aims to remind the viewer of the vulnerability of the body and the weight of the world.
Press release from Gallery Isabelle
Image: DaliaBaassiri. When The Season Returns XXIV. 2024. Acrylic, wall paint collected from Fayyad Building (post-Beirut Explosion), graphite, threads, hot glue sticks, organza fabric, archival glue and varnish on canvas. 96 x 117 cm. Photography by Atamash Urooj. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Isabelle, Dubai
