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Sweet City Sculpther
By:
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Gita Meh
Sweet City
In the name of God who created the sweet-‐taste and gave it life. This world is created out of Love. Made out of sweetness of God. Sweetness is the way home to Allah. He did not want it any other way. The inner and outer space is a sweet taste Allah created for us. TransliteraCon from Rumi by: Gita Meh
Born in Tehran, Iran in 1963, she lives and works in Dubai, UAE In 1979 the Islamic RevoluCon marked for me the beginning of a new avant-‐garde forms of visual expression in Iran. It was in 1983 during Iran Iraq war that my parents had to migrate to the West, where I conCnued to study and pursuit art. My ongoing body of work deconstructs my Middle Eastern and Western cultures as I reconstruct and reinforce the best of both tradiCons. My work promotes mulCculturalism by using visual and wriTen languages as tools to form a space of human interacCon and cultural integraCon. I draw from my personal history and its implicaCons in modern Middle Eastern society to reconstruct the noCon of Islamic/Middle Eastern art through conceptual art. I examine how idenCty is shaped by differences in language, gender, ethnicity and culture, desire, exile, solitude and freedom. I allow each spectator to re-‐create his or her own experience of my created cross-‐cultural spaces. My art adds a new substance to mulCculturalism, giving advancement to the nearing of cultural differences between East and the West. My work introduces a dialog that criCques the human form, human word and the human home. My art speaks about distribuCons of cultures. I take the iniCaCve using my cross-‐cultural resources to achieve a broader form of integraCon. My work creates visual thinking. I understand my iniCal impulse to form and word. I work on diverse canvases of textural material. Female bodies transfigure from nude to veiled into Alphabeta. Woman’s removed body hair becomes surrounding walls. Onions become an abundance of nourishing breasts. GliTer is brushed as if paint. Scanner becomes my digital camera. Sugar becomes a projecCon screen as images melt. Hand painted fountain Cles become architectural facades. Persian carpets become my white canvas. Painted laptops convert to flying carpets. Koranic verse becomes running horses. Fresh apples become painCngs and hang from the ceiling Cll they disintegrate in Cme. I fire clay homes to build my own ciCes. And food becomes digesCble art. As I express my visual vocabulary in a desire to point dot by dot to contemporary Islam and the wild West in this present.
Sweet City 200 cm height 200 cm width 124 cm mosque
FUTURE PROJECT INSTALLATION DRWAING
Gita Meh: Sweet City Sweet City is a sculpther that consists of a main building, the mosque, where Muslims go for worship, and two tall high-‐rises, where people reside. The towers are aTached to each side of the mosque, in place of the minarets from which the muezzin calls the people to prayer. Sweet City is made of nabat, or spun rock candy. Nabat to Iranians is the grape-‐like bouquet of translucent shapes crystallized around a twine, having the look and feel of hard candy. Nabat results from the process of crystallizing sugar with a touch of saffron used for flavoring, perfuming and coloring the sugar to a bright orange-‐yellow color. Islam is constantly in a process of modernizaCon and adapCon. That ability to adapt and update is embodied in the evoluCon of Islamic architecture. Islam changes from one architecture to another, but does not change from one God to another. Sweet City is the study of the source of “Sweet God,” Allah. This installaCon depicts how Islam is even now in the rapid process of modernizaCon, and how this process progresses towards forming and meaning the sweetness that God promises. This sculpther represents the evoluCon of Islam and its contemporary ciCes with their contrasCng landscape of mosques and high-‐rises, poinCng ulCmately to the ownership of land not by people but by God. In the end, the mosque, with its visual and religious funcCon, becomes the only architectural presence that inherently disCnguishes the Islamic city and its lived culture from Western ciCes. The process of nabat becomes the analyCcal symbol direcCng us even beyond the Islamic city, toward a parCcular aim of Islam. Using nabat to “build” a mosque embodies change and points to future development towards the promised paradise on earth. Nabat in this context is the visible embodiment of evoluCon according to Islam. The use of nabat here is as a cultural symbol with a historical foundaCon, comprising a ritual that represents the Quranic promise. In Sweet City you see inside from outside and outside from inside. In the mosque structure the two minarets have become two high-‐rises. The structure becomes what Muslim ciCes are becoming: contemporary. The minarets, aher all, sCll call people to the sweetness Allah has planned for us, even as they take on the look and funcCon of our age. People go home to rest in such high-‐rises; their souls go to the mosque to rest. Here, both resCng places are envisioned as made out of sugar – nabat – in order to embody the sweetness into which Allah calls us, body and soul. These are the minarets of new Islamic civilizaCon. At the heart of rapidly modernizing Muslim ciCes Sweet City finds a sweet Islam also in the process of modernizaCon, a 21st-‐century Islam bringing together the sweetness of all civilizaCons from West to East. Dubai, for instance, is an Islamic meeCng place for all cultures, where Islam sees the purpose of life in sweetness of acCon towards others – construcCve Islam constructed in search of the sweetness of Islam. UlCmately, Sweet City is the next step, toward heaven itself, where life and God become one.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT Peter Frank: Sweet City Sweet City is a sculpther conceived and fabricated by Gita Meh, an arCst currently living in Dubai who was born and raised in Teheran and has lived, studied and worked in several European countries and the United States. Meh works in a variety of media, from painCng to installaCon, sculpther to poetry, photography to performance; in her aTempt to touch all aspects of sensaCon and intellect in her viewers, she has ohen involved herself with food preparaCon and ritual, thus engaging taste, smell, and touch as well as sound and sight. Sweet City follows in this vein. In Sweet City Meh draws from her Muslim heritage to envision Islam at once as a modern – modernized and modernizing – force and as a transcendent enCty, an evoluCon towards a goal and the goal itself. By fabricaCng a mosque out of spun sugar – the nabat prized especially by Iranians – Meh establishes a readily comprehendable metaphor based on the trope of spiritual sweetness. The tacClity as well as aroma of the nabat are immediate and unavoidable, speaking to atavisCc levels of our awareness. The sculpture is more than a mere sculptural object or spaCal construcCon; even without tasCng it, Sweet City is a sensual experience. By replacing the mosque’s tradiConal minarets with residenCal skyscrapers of the kind that now dot so many large ciCes throughout Islam, Meh establishes another easily read, but this Cme not easily comprehended, metaphor – one that, in the wake of post-‐modernist cynicism and anC-‐modernist retrenchment, effecCvely reclaims the teleological, even utopian, drive of Modernism for Islam (which in its heyday was the world’s modernizing force) without a change in tenet. (As Meh writes, “Islam changes from one architecture to another, but does not change from one God to another.”) She regards the vigorous urbanizing of centers such as Dubai as a signal that Islam is, among other things, a contemporary discourse, a context for improving the quality of daily life materially as well as spiritually. UlCmately, Meh’s conflaCon of the contemporary and the Cmeless, the material and the transcendent, represents the conflaCon of the material and the spiritual and asserts the possibility of a paradise that does not so much contrast with quoCdian misery as grow out of the more limited but sCll sweet pleasure of the everyday. The present is not enough, Meh infers, but through both devoCon (the mosque) and responsivity to ordinary pleasures (the nabat) the path to paradise can be discerned. Each of the high-‐rises stands at 2 meters high on each side of the mosque. The mosque structure stands at 1.24 meters high, has an arched entranceway cresCng at 65cm and a diameter of 1 meters.