Alia Farid explores the implications of excessive exploitation and environmental degradation in Bneid Al Gar, her solo show at Oslo’s Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.
Oil and water mix to intriguing effect in Alia Farid’s largest solo exhibition to date at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo. In Bneid Al Gar, the Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist ponders on what is lost when natural resources are tapped to excess, traditional ways of living are ignored and landscapes are impacted by conflict. She leaves viewers to consider the answers.
Farid is the third recipient of The Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, which recognises an international artist making work “relevant to our time”. Her celebratory Henie Onstad exhibition – which accompanies a USD 100,000 honorarium – is titled after the Arabic for “land of tar” and refers to Farid’s childhood in a region of Kuwait where large “bruise-like stains” of oil once punctuated the surface of the ground. Several of Farid’s key series are featured, with works ranging across a wide variety of media, including sculpture, textiles, works on paper and film.
Farid is interested in the abrasions felt along national boundary lines, specifically the tensions “over resources created and exacerbated by colonial borders, things like water and oil”. This complex narrative touches on economic appetites, national pride, technological developments and the significance – historically, socially and ecologically – of removing nomadic populations from regions and changing ancient ways of living in sync with the natural world.
At the heart of the show is a group of monumental fibreglass sculptures entitled In Lieu of What Is (2022), ready-mades of a sort. Farid works with a “scrappy workshop in the desert” in Kuwait, a firm that already makes drinking fountains that can be found throughout the Arabian Gulf, outsized structures shaped like every-day objects such as jugs and traditional doors. Farid presents five of her own versions here: one is in the form of a throwaway water bottle, another a giant jerry can. She purposefully leaves her versions unpainted to make them seem like artefacts from an archaeological dig.
In the adjacent gallery, rows of handwoven and embroidered textile pieces from her Elsewhere series (2023) hang like shop awnings on a high street. Handcrafted using a flat-weaving process by artisans in Nasirya in southern Iraq, these rugs, with their compositions of mosques and menus of Arabic cuisine, delve into the iconography of the Palestinian community in Puerto Rico, part of a larger Arab migration to Latin America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An adjunct to this ongoing project is a new series, Izar (2024), in which Farid creates ghostlike imprints of traditional Iraqi textile patterns frottaged onto palm-tree paper.
Farid also has several films showing at Henie Onstad, screened on separate walls in the main gallery. Chibayish, a two-part work shot in 2022 and 2023, features footage of three residents in the southern marshlands of Iraq, a region affected by enforced displacement and environmental degradation from the oil industry. Shots of young boatmen at work in the canals – as well as swimming, singing and playing – and of buffalo churning slowly through the water are punctuated with computer-generated images of discarded plastic water bottles tumbling through the air. This curious mix is threaded together by a soundtrack of folk songs, youthful chatter and the rustle of reeds. The effect is mesmeric.
At the Time of the Ebb, an earlier work from 2019, features a piece of mysterious summer solstice performance on the shoreline of Qeshm Island in the Arabian Gulf. This pastoral celebration – with its mythical air of rustic costumes, masks and music – is disrupted by a scene in which a camel chews the wrapping from a contemporary courier-service parcel.
Outside the main entrance to Henie Onstad’s striking, brutalist, fjord-side building stand two of Farid’s artificial palm trees rendered in plastic and LED lights, glowing abnormally like a Las Vegas idea of an oasis. Again, the audience is presented with the environmental made artificial. Fun or garish? You can decide.
Oil has become a combustible subject for contemporary artists, especially ones from countries such as Kuwait and Norway that rely on fossil fuels for their national wealth. “Those parallels were drawn,” says Farid, before adding: “I think they’re managing things differently in Norway.” But Farid’s work is neither didactic nor openly critical of individuals, companies or governments. Instead, she explains, “it has to do with our relationship to nature.” She is primarily concerned with man’s desire to harness and control resources. “We drive past these infrastructures and no one stops to consider what the implications are in relation to the landscape and even socially between communities.”
Farid’s Oslo show highlights an artistic practice that is both subtle and collaborative and which often works as a framing device for what should be self evident: the precarious state of landscapes, surreal consumerism, valuable crafts and traditions in peril. This fine exhibition, and the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, will no doubt further the artist’s mission to incite conversations about what happens when the natural becomes unnatural.
Bneid Al Gar ended 5 January 2025
