Katie Addada Shlon

lovers, lovers, lovers of the land

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installed at BASEMENT Art Space in Chapel Hill, NC | 2023

In lovers, lovers, lovers of the land I asked viewers to contemplate the cultural/ collective implications of a history of land dispossession, violent colonization, and reality of resistance in the Levant through an exhibition of drawings, poems, sculpture, and an adjoining majlis room. In the introduction to Contemporary Arab Thought, editor Elizabeth Kassab writes: "How can one re-create a living relationship with one's history and heritage after one has been estranged from them by colonial alienation?... Who is to decide and on what basis?" In this fraught condition of identity, the act of collective remembering becomes the path forward. The entry into the gallery serves as a sitting room (majlis) and was activated by gatherings where guests were invited to bring tangible comforts and share tea, stories, traditional music, and crafts from our cultures together. In the absence of community, the sitting room is notably empty awaiting its next gathering. Both the exhibition and majlis were open by invitation only.

The main gallery space of lovers, lovers, lovers of the land is framed by minimal drawings, text-based works on paper, and sculptural gestures. Suggesting the power of absence as presence, the gaps left in the work serve as a catalyst for communal activations in the adjoining sitting room. In contemplating the absence of the original work among the presence of drawings, poetry, and a built environment, this exhibition examines issues of colonization and displacement as well as care and community.