Lot 42: Mahdi Al-Jeraibi (Saudi, b. 1969)

Mahdi Al-Jeraibi (Saudi, b. 1969)
Dialectic
wooden school desk
15¾ x 23 5/8in. (40 x 60cm.)
Executed in 2000

London, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, Edge of Arabia, 16 October - 13 December 2008 (illustrated in colour p.52)
Paris, Cité Internationale des Arts, Mahdi Al Jeraibi: Dialectiques, 1 - 13 October, 2001 (illustrated in colour p.60 and on the cover)

This lot offered for sale is subject to a 5% import duty on the importation value levied at the time of collection/shipment within the UAE.
"I wanted to stir something in the way people engaged with particular artworks. I wanted people to be involved. Also these desks represented a collective memory. So it was important that the audience felt some kind of ownership or involvement with them. I wanted it to be like a theatrical display with the fourth wall no longer there."
With his painted response to the desks already hung, the schooldesks were placed inside Hessian sacks marked ALL WERE HERE and heaped together in the centre of the room. On the walls opposite was a series of hooks corresponding to rings screwed into each desk. On arrival members of the audience were invited to hang the desks on the wall as they liked.Art should be an experience rather than something that you simply look at. I wanted to question the cultural mode ofexhibition-hanging, as well as introduce an element of theatricality to the way these desks were shown. Nothing like this had ever been attempted before. It was one of the most inclusive and ground-breaking artistic presentations in Saudi Arabian art history, not least because of the objects being used. When you get up close to the desks you encounter a myopic palimpsest of names, student numbers, places, crushes, football teams, slogans,or careful diagrammatic representations of the above tattooed into the wooden flesh of the desk. Theres a heart with an arrow through it, or a football pitch with crosses explaining how a particular goal was scored a goal of delicious, unforgettable beauty. Each is a trace that has been allowed to last beyond both its creator and the action that bore it. In some, the scratching is so ferocious and sustained that a hole has appeared. These desks become monuments to unrequited daydreams, the art of looking-out-of-the-window, literally or metaphorically; but they also explore the latent power of the mark. From the Lascaux Caves via Cy Twombly to a secondary school in Makkah, the possibilities are in one sense identical. For a Western audience the meaning of these marks is also, in places, intensified, when they appear to oscillate between being pared-down visual signifiers and streams of Arabic text. None of these marks were made by Al-Jeraibi. So to add to the list of firsts, the occasion in 2000 when he showed his Dialectics was the first time a Saudi artist had presented a body of work to which he had added nothing. The power of the art lay instead in its conceptual design.'(Henry Hemming, Edge of Arabia, London, 2008, pp.54-55)