Lot 156: - Walid Siti , Iraqi B. 1954 Tents and Pyramids acrylic on canvas

signed and dated 98 ; signed, titled and dated 98 on the reverse acrylic on canvas

measurements note 147 by 205cm.; 57 7/8 by 80 3/4 in.

London, Leighton House Museum, Walid Siti - Land on Fire, 2008, p. 28, illustrated in colour

Born in Iraqi Kurdistan and based in the United Kingdom, Walid Siti's origins, the volatile state of his home country at present, and his physical distance from it have factored into the critical standpoint that Siti expresses by way of his abstract and imagined landscapes on both reality in the Arab World and on life. Siti constructs the natural scenes in his paintings from simple shapes: cubes, circles, and cones, each block of which is representative of the essential opposing forces of existence: forces like those of construction and destruction, rise and fall, and beginning and end. Reminiscent of post-war or apocalyptic scenes, both in the moroseness of their colours and in their rigid ordering of elements that clashingly play into the whole, Siti's compositions vividly encapsulate the tension inherent in the antagonism between these forces of being. But amidst the blur of the turbulent scenes he creates and the ominous fence, cage and tomb-like motifs that pervade them, Walid Siti never fails to insert a source of light. This luminescence refers to Siti's quest to find a resolution to such contradictions, to his attempt to locate balance, truth and meaning, and to his pursuit of inner peace; it tells of his acceptance of the certainty of uncertainty and the permanence of transience. In Tents and Pyramids, a work inspired in title and concept from Fouad Khuri's book, Walid Siti takes on another pair of disparate forces - different hierarchical systems or ways of ruling/being ruled. As Khuri outlines in his book, in the pyramid system there is hierarchal structure to authority and a gradation of power while the tent system allows an absence of both. Authority in the latter is gained through the exertion of physical force; one person rules autocratically above all others. Khuri states that the Arab World subscribes to the tent system and sets out to attribute this phenomenon to the way in which Arabs perceive and deal with reality.


In Siti's painting, a pyramid allegorically emerges from what appears to be a desert setting, the place from which this structure originated. A tent is, however, superimposed over this pyramid. The superimposition of the tent over the pyramid is a metaphor for the path that the people of this desert, the Arabs, have taken in their course through time: a path that Sitti sees as regression. Rather than develop from what the artist views as a backward state (the tent system) to a more civilized state (the pyramid system), Siti notes that the opposite progression has taken place. Tents and Pyramids thus epitomizes the backtrack of a civilization that, thousands of years ago, produced the pyramid, a large stable structure based on ground-breaking ideas of weight distribution, but which, today, is slowly moving towards the chaotic and dictatorial system of the tent.