Shadi Al-Atallah, Fear for reason, 2023, Acrylic, pencil, ink and oil pastel on canvas, 115 x 160 cm, 45 1/4 x 63 in
Shadi Al-Atallah was born in Saudi Arabia in 1994 and currently lives and works in London, UK. They received their MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2021. Al-Atallah creates large-scale figurative paintings: the dark and dynamic figures depicted in their mixed-media work are distorted self-portraits of the artist that capture the absurdity of conflicting emotional states. Their work explores the performativity of cathartic spiritual practice by drawing connections between the Queer ballroom scene and folkloric dance traditions from African diasporic communities in the Arabian Peninsula.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background as an artist?
My practice takes on many different forms and ideas but I always go back to trying to understand the human condition and our collective and personal thoughts and emotions and how those thoughts and emotions come to exist in our bodies. Whatever topic I’m interested in at the time, whether it’s wrestling or aliens, it all manifests in the intense scenes that I paint between figures in domestic or sterile settings like hospital rooms and corridors. I enjoy paintings the most so this is my main output at the moment. I create paintings that allow me to have a physical experience making, usually by walking around and on top of them on the floor using my entire body to apply the paint. I think of my process as an important part of my practice because that’s when my ideas come through and I like to work in an intuitive way.
Can you walk us through the creative process for this piece; from idea conception to completion?
I consider each painting as part of a series of works that marks a time period. For me this piece is a part of the continuum, an amalgamation of all the experiences, thoughts and research that went into my practice the last year or so. So when I talk about a singular piece I’m talking about all of them, all the motifs and figures are interconnected and tell a non-linear story in an imagined space between reality and fiction. I began thinking of this series directly after Fistfight, after what felt like a very intense and introspective summer, I felt able to look outwards again at a more macro scale. I felt that strong shift that many of us felt in terms of apocalyptic scenarios and what the end of the world would look like. I’ve always been gravitated to science fiction, and the imagery that conjures up our inmost fears and brings our deepest beliefs into question. I find our fear of extra-terrestrial life to be especially intriguing because it’s such a unique one, we fear what is other and what can bring us to doubt everything we’ve ever believed about our existence in a way even death and religion can’t. So that’s what my work is about now, and this piece came about during that time period where I was thinking a lot about this stuff and I was playing around with non-human/extraterrestrial types of figures in violent/romantic scenes. It’s kind of serious, a little bit of poking fun at mass hysteria surrounding this fear of the ‘other’, and how trans discourse is discussed in the media.
As with many of the works in your solo show ‘Fistfight’ at Guts Gallery, this piece depicts two figures in a flourish of violence in a domestic scene. Why do you think you keep returning to this subject matter?
It’s an image that draws me in because it can summon a type of feeling that is hard to put into words. It’s a scene that has been used across history and it’s one that intrigues me in its simple intensity. When I was initially painting, I used to only paint one figure but this scene kept coming up for me every time I envisioned another figure being in my paintings, I think because there was always some type of struggle and it only made sense at the time. A lot of these images I have encountered in religious texts and myths, referencing a type of spiritual struggle between man and god. In reference to my current research, this scene fits into the apocalyptic scenario well because it makes you question is this sexual tension with an alien or is it a bad fight or struggle or maybe both?
This year Platform is curated by Gemma Rolls Bentley and is titled ‘A Million Candles;’ a reference to Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. With Orlando, Woolf creates an imaginative biography of her lover and muse Vita Sackville-West in which the protagonist travels through time and blurs the boundaries of gender. In much of your work, the figures you depict are disruptive; they embody a non-normative, boundary-pushing ambiguity as they fight and grapple with each other. Could you go into why you depict figures in this way?
My figures are genderless because I feel like gender can get in the way of things. It feels like it’s a topic we can’t escape, so even though I’m trying not to depict gender explicitly, my work always seems to graze it somehow. I think a lot of that has to do with my own personal experience with gender, sometimes it’s an ideal form that I’m depicting and other times it’s everything I struggle with. As a person with a trans experience it always creeps up into my work even if it’s not intentional. I’m just depicting bodies that I know and am familiar with. With my current research into our cultural fascination with aliens and their forms, I think I’m interested in this idea of science fiction playing perfectly into the narrative of transness and what it means. It sums up a lot of society’s fears, expectations, fetishes, and allure towards what cannot be understood.
