Walid Siti: Selected Works

Overview

Walid Siti’s work explores one’s relationship to heritage, home, borders, mobility and migration, inscribing a rich terrain that today is further marked by militarised checkpoints, national borders and waves of migration. Confronting the enduring legacies of colonialism, Siti contemplates discrepancies between the geographic map and one’s lived experience.

Siti’s SB13 commission, Phantom Land (2017), taps into the heart of a place shaped by past and present volatility. Seismic shifts and disturbances across time and space are rendered in the work’s disorienting formations, which have been built up from a mixture of plaster of Paris, grout and acrylic paint. Described by the artist as a ‘primeval formation’, the conceptual and material exploration registers the unknown stories of the lost and the missing, while perhaps suggesting other potentials.

Walid Siti’s SB13 commission, False Flags (2017), reflects on our fragile attachment to iconic emblems of identity. The title of the work suggests not only that flags often fall short of capturing the pride of a people, but also that their symbolic status has become increasingly instrumentalised by state-sanctioned suppression and territorial conflicts that are often shaped by the interests of distant proxy powers. Exploring the inverse of the conventional flag form, Walid Siti’s False Flags is characterised by the use of netting, absence of colour and tormented shapes. Equally defined by their negative space as much as their material presence, the displaced entities inspire consideration of collective struggle and belonging, both within and in spite of the nation state and other such ideological constructions.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.