Amin Alsaden

  • Hanaa Malallah, Shroud IV, 2012, burnt canvas, plants, sand, seeds, wooden numbers, taxidermy birds, ash, burnt calico, 59 × 59".
    print March 2023

    UNVANQUISHED

    A SPLATTERING of black, white, and red binds a mass of darkly clothed brown bodies. Media outlets relish such portrayals of protesters carrying Iraqi flags in the rallies that erupt regularly in Baghdad, indicative of the strife that has beset Iraq in recent years. The images are understandably appealing: They possess a sense of drama, even an epic quality; perhaps those scenes also resonate with a disgruntled world numbed by pervasive injustices. In the same photographs, a colossal structure often appears, one not dissimilar to the demonstrators’ signs, rising above the crowds: the July 14th

  • View of “ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ/Ruovttu Guvlui/Towards Home,” 2022–23, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. Photo: Mathieu Gagnon.
    slant November 2022

    ARCTIC WARMTH

    A SOFT GRADIENT BECKONS. Evoking sunrise across a gallery wall, its pale orange fades into a delicate blush of pink. The atmospheric hues, connoting a clear morning sky over an open landscape, serve as the backdrop for a humble wooden structure. A freestanding, zigzagging wall, it is bare on one side, while on the other, the skeletal construction suggests a fragment of an interior, an armature for a dense agglomeration of artifacts—parkas, mittens, boots, and other personal and domestic objects indicative of a colder climate. The tropes and trappings of conventional architecture are absent.

    “ᐊᖏ