I Love Ancient Baby — Owen Pratt

The solo exhibition I Love Ancient Baby by Jala Wahid shows an emotional and seductive staging of form, material and space a new video work of the same name and a series of new sculptures.

Starting point of the exhibition I Love Ancient Baby is the idea that time and feelings are cyclical, that we have the same fears and longings as ancient civilizations thousands of years ago, and that artifacts are charged with these feelings.
Museum photographs, playing cards, sculptures, wall paintings and lighting produced for the soldiers in the Iraq war, the artist uses techniques of juxtaposition and montage to develop a narrative of objects and people who are lost and found. The ambivalences of this narrative are related to archeology, discovery and redemption, cultural appropriation and colonialism. Wahid gives them a voice as playfully as personally, as if the dice were re-deciding or the cards were shuffled to shift or correct the underlying meaning.

The exhibition focuses on the cultural, historical and individual networks of relationships into which a person is born, – and how they are interwoven with the complicated and toxic relationships of monuments, symbols and affects. These braids exist between people who have already died and people who are still being born, between the foreign and their own history, between place and placelessness. Paths and journeys are repeated in the literal and figurative sense, life comes and fades and begins again between feelings of joy and sadness. So is I Love Ancient Babyalso a very intimate work in which Wahid addresses her late father and her unborn child, as well as the ancient sculptures in which they embody themselves. The abstract and archived objects are fetched from the museum distance and traced back to the wishes and fears that were then placed in them. History and stories, loss and rediscovery overlap.

The emotional connections that man tends to make seem to defy through archaeological finds or memories of time. I Love Ancient Babytherefore suggests examining how these feelings are specifically linked to their sculptural design. Jala Wahid creates her own contemporary symbolism in connection with complex relationships and affects of cultural and individual identities. Based on the ancient sculptures and contemporary Kurdish history, she emphasizes the importance of counter-hegemonic voices and feelings against the background of superficial patriarchal (and neo-colonial) narratives of economic and political dependencies.

Jala Wahid (* 1988, lives and works in London) studied fine art at the Royal Academy of Arts and Goldsmiths College in London. Solo exhibitions last among others 2023 Kunstverein Freiburg; 2022 BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead / GB, Niru Ratnam Gallery, London / GB; 2021 CAS Batumi, Batumi / GE, Two Queens, Leicester / GB; 2020 E.A. Shared Space, Tbilisi / GE