The meeting of the sacred and the profane : Between modernism and modernity

Work Study and Research 3 license - 2014/2015
By French critic: Loïc Kervran

The Supreme Kaaba of God
Shadia Alem

In Shadia’ series” The Supreme Ka’aba Of God” a feeling of suffocation takes place. The Kaaba seems struggling finding its space.  On Image 1, The Kaaba appears sandwiched between enormous constructions, which seem to overlap like tiles, or the scales of a snake (see Image 6, where windows form a snake, or a maze that evokes the work of the Dutch artist Escher, but exceeds him in enhancing the maze to suffocation.

The works leave a tiny window to peep at The Kaaba. The impression of lack of space is reinforced by the covering its full surface by the constructions.

In the center, the Kaaba appears where one could hardly see the ground, an open area covered with the pilgrims’ crowd.

In image 2, the viewer and the artist have trouble finding the top corner, through which he/she can catch a glimpse of the sacred Kaaba, as cranes seem to form a net that have been barely pushed apart by a hand that had parted them like a theater curtain. And again, the crowd of cranes in the air meets the crowd of pilgrims on the ground.

These sensations are reinforced by an essentially horizontal treatment very visible in Image 4 but also in Images 1 and 6, which help to flatten the forms and crush space and sacred edifice, which is never fully represented (unlike traditional images 7 and 8 for example), a deliberate absence of the historical and sacred Kaaba threatened by invasive modernity and secular theme.

We must see in these representations an echo of personal biographical elements of the artist.

It is first a reminiscence of her childhood. Indeed her family, as spiritual leaders, had to host a flood of pilgrims. Thus, during the pilgrimage season, the family had to evacuate the house and live on the seventh floor, opening lower floors to the pilgrims. This sudden lack of space, along with the panoramic view of the city and the crowd of believers in the streets and holy mosque find themselves in Shadia Alem’s series “The Supreme Kaaba of God”.

During the period of Hajj, Mecca also becomes virtually impassable, Shadia Alem described, how, as a child, she could barely go out of the house, when stepping out meant being swallowed by a dense crowd.

The lack of space is also a constant concern of adult artist, she has become. As this lacking of working space is raised again lately, after losing her home and atelier in 2011 floods in Jeddah, when the artist had to give a spacious atelier for a much smaller space in Paris, which triggered the lack of space to store her works, so she moved to photography and the digital, which is easier to store, but again, her computer is jammed with her passion for photographing endlessly.