Jala Wahid
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2020
1988
Austria
SOPHIE TAPPEINER
Jala Wahid (b. 1988, lives and works in London) works across sculpture, video, installation and writing. She looks to the emotive and symbolic potential of materials, music and song in exploring the interregional and internal politics of Kurdistan and the implications this has from a diasporic perspective. She is interested in the complexities of nationalism within a stateless people, history, iconography, archiving, and Kurdish culture and politics as forms of self-preservation and defiance.
Jala Wahid, Vernal Pyre, 2019, jesmonite, fibreglass, mica, 200 x 200 x 3 cm.
This is the sky, then, this huge suspension, presiding over these sulphurous landscapes we ponder upon. A high mountain; a burning flame; a smouldering sun. A liquid glance over our shoulder; only a moving picture of silk, not real but still substantial. Crushing and waxing makes the silk shimmer and dance in harmony with the alchemical Baba Gurgur; swirling in silk and fabric create shapes and patterns that defy the loose stones of the mountainside. Euphoria emerges out of darkness; orange light darkens and the outline of the world is obscured and fills with uncertainty.
It’s in the darkest o ...
Jala Wahid received her BA from Goldsmiths, London in 2014 and completed her PgDip in Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2019.
Recent exhibitions include: 2019 'Newroz' Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna; ‘Searching the Sky for Rain’, ScupltureCenter, New York; ‘
SELECTED PRESS
Jala Wahid, Nothing left to protect or to protect you, 2020.
