Rearranging the Riddle: Shaikha Al Mazrou

Shaikha Al Mazrou’s Rearranging the Riddle, installation view at Maraya Art Centre, March 2020. Image courtesy Maraya Art Centre.

The Sorites Paradox, for those who don’t know, is a riddle that remains a riddle to mathematicians. It presents the question, when does a heap become a non-heap, at what point and with which grain of material does this change take place, and there is no answer. Shaikha Al Mazrou used this paradox as the central point for her artwork Close To The Coast But Not Too Close 2020), which is a heap of blue hand-dyed sand displayed in her current solo exhibition Rearranging the Riddle, at Maraya Art Centre. The exhibition, which opened on March 7 but remains closed now due to the ongoing Covd-19 epidemic, is a presentation of seven new bodies of work, which are all an homage to an exact shade of the colour blue, which the artist saw in a dream.

Shaikha Al Mazrou. Close To The Coast But Not Too Close (2020). As displayed in Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah. March-July 2020. Image courtesy of Maraya Art Centre

Best known for her explorations into materiality and form, Al Mazrou does not usually reveal intimate or personal details in her works. At least not at first glance. But for the development of this show, curated by Cristiana De Marchi, she has worked hard to infuse emotion and, although it is not immediately obvious, all of the pieces here are based on personal conversations and experiences, which she reveals and conceals at the same time.

In a new video, released by Maraya after the space was forced to close because of the public health crisis, Al Mazrou is interviewed and she describes the whole show as an autobiography. This is reminiscent of one piece in the exhibition – brick-shaped blocks of different shades of blue displayed on market-style shelvees called An Autobiography of A Color (2020). The work is based on titles found through a commercial paint supplier and Al Mazrou chose each one because she had an emotional reaction to it. Although formal and abstract, the combination of the tones and the poetic titles does elicit a reaction that is indefinable. 

Shaikha Al Mazrou. To Create Meaning In Perception (2020). As displayed in Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah. March-July 2020. Image courtesy of Maraya Art Centre

Al Mazrou cites Briony Fer’s On Abstract Art as playing a fundamental role in the research for this her first institutional solo show and she is interested, as was the author of this book, in the personal signifiers within abstract art. Although minimal, there is a multitude of stories to be discovered in each work. However, whilst the show is about discovering more about the artist, it is also a quest of self-reflection. Al Mazrou’s piece To Create Meaning In Perception (2020), which consists of five large panels of glass carrying reflective surfaces all in varying shades of blue, helps us to take this quite literally. The colour of the filmic laminate changes depending on the viewer’s position and their powerful presence is also fragile – a metaphor that we can relate to human experience.

Much of the show pivots around ideas of division of the whole. The central copper sculptures We Met Halfway (2020) are square at one end and at the other, circular, but where is the exact moment of that change? Again, this remains a riddle. For The Things That Will Remain Unsaid (2020) contains a similar conundrum. It is made of 200 sheets of hand-made (blue) paper and each blank sheet - a fairly obvious metaphor for potential - is unique yet layered together with the others to form a whole. Speaking of half-way points, the piece titled Sky and Ocean And Everything In Between (2020), is two resin blocks placed on the floor with a space between them. It is the tension within that space that Al Mazrou is pointing our attention to. It holds nothing and everything; all that can be and all that has never been. These kinds of complex ideas are what underpin the whole show. Humanity is complex and the lived experience is a riddle for which there is no answer.

Shaikha Al Mazrou with her twin sons, Marwan and Omar, at the opening of her exhibition Rearranging The Riddle. Image taken in March 2020. Image courtesy of Maraya Art Centre.

• Rearranging the Riddle: New Works by Shaikha Al Mazrou. Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah. March 7 - July 25, 2020.