Rand Abdul Jabbar’s art prompts us to reflect on how objects and symbols tie us to history. Universal yet intimate, her work carries a civilisational meaning we can still feel today.
Abdul Jabbar’s work slices through thousands of years of history to reveal the often dormant narratives that resurface over time. For someone whose practice collapses time, working with clay is particularly significant because of its malleability, memory, and links to material culture and history. The exhibition will feature twenty ceramic sculptures from her Earthly Wonders, Celestial Beings (2019-ongoing) body of work, which was awarded the Richard Mille Art Prize in 2022. The existing works will be shown alongside thirty new sculptures produced for this exhibition, through which Abdul Jabbar highlights and expands on three sculptural groupings - fertility, eye idols, and crowns - symbolizing acts of living, seeing, and knowing. The representations of female figures and the palm tree compose her fertility series, gesturing at notions of birth, renewal, and abundance. Her eye idols, which recall artifacts exhumed from the ancient Mesopotamian Eye Temple at Tell Brak in 1937, hold the memory of all they have observed as they gaze out across the exhibition floor. Meanwhile, the crowns that she has molded represent for her the wisdom derived from the accumulated knowledge gathered from across the centuries.
