Grieving in Colours
Glazed ceramics sculptures, 2024
Where does grief reside in the body? Is pain a seed that sprouts in turmoil, or is it imposed on the body, saturating it with grief?
I am myself. I am my collective body. And my collective body is gradually and violently being killed.
I open my eyes, I close my eyes, and the grieve keeps getting more incomprehensible.
How can the collective pain feel THIS personal?
They say that grief comes in stages, beginning with shock and ending with acceptance. They say these stages vibrate in the body with light and color. My grief is going through all the stages at once, compact, dense, and suffocating. White taken over by red, red taken over by gray, gray taken over by yellow, yellow taken over by green, green taken over by all the colors.
And I cannot stop grieving in sourness.
I am myself. I am my collective body. And my collective body is gradually and violently being killed.
I open my eyes, I close my eyes, and the grieve keeps getting more incomprehensible.
How can the collective pain feel THIS personal?
They say that grief comes in stages, beginning with shock and ending with acceptance. They say these stages vibrate in the body with light and color. My grief is going through all the stages at once, compact, dense, and suffocating. White taken over by red, red taken over by gray, gray taken over by yellow, yellow taken over by green, green taken over by all the colors.
And I cannot stop grieving in sourness.
“In a series of ceramic wall pieces, Grieving in Colours (2024), a batch of gloopy oranges is glazed in a variety of colours. Rot and mould have set in and the individual fruit dissolves into one citrusy mess. The pieces are gorgeously lush and absolutely disconcerting at the same time. The artist often speaks of how her work addresses collective experiences. In this particular work the singular orange stands for the whole, the whole for a singular orange. The port city of Jaffa, where Bamieh’s paternal family originally hails from, is most commonly associated with the export of citrus. Oranges are highly iconographic in Palestinian visual art and literature, indicating a strong agricultural connection to the land and, following the Nakba, the severance of this bond. This motif is most forcefully articulated in Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 short story “The Land of Sad Oranges,” which describes the expulsion of a Palestinian family from Jaffa in 1948. Grieving in Colours, in this respect, addresses accumulative grief: that of the past, that what is ongoing, and that of the future.”
By Nat Muller, from Sour Things curatorial statement.
Sculptures comissioned by NIKA Project Space, for Sour Things Solo show at NIKA Paris.
