Spells On Our Youth

Overview

This was Diana Al Hadid's first temporary outdoor work and the first work she had made entirely on site mostly using local resources and raw materials, particularly metal rods.

Al Hadid constructed a spiralling form reminiscent of Monument to the Third International, or Tatlin’s tower, a building envisioned but never actually built, by Russian avant garde artist and constructivist architect Vladimir Tatlin in the 1920s. Referencing the project’s site-specific backdrop of Port Khalid’s drilling rigs with their towering metal infrastructure, Spells on our Youth, resonated strongly with the physical environment of Sharjah and also with the wider debate on issues of development and construction within the UAE.

The delicate ascension of the structure revealed a clear and distinct relationship to the substantial component of drawing that is present in Al Hadid's practice. One drawn mark builds on another mark organically until a final image forms. The metal rods in Spells on our Youth are similarly accumulated like drawn marks to form the three-dimensional monument. Al Hadid then welds the form rod by rod, leaving the structure partially unfinished and more open than in much of her previous work.

October 2010

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 9