Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present Those Houses Behind the Army Canal, a solo exhibition featuring Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s recent body of work. This series is the second chapter of Alfraji’s project Books of Passage, charting three generations of migration in his family. The first chapter, entitled The River That Was in the South (2019) was shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Ayyam Gallery in Dubai and the Cairo Biennale.
Books of Passage consists of three chapters in which the artist explores how identity was formed in his grandfather’s, father’s and his own generation. As he explores existential questions about the world around him, Alfraji collects and arranges personal and collective memories, in an attempt to understand and dissect them using the tools he works with as an artist.
Alfraji believes that memory consists of several layers which may conflict with each other, or exist as fragments, or be interwoven with each other, and are generally also incomplete due to the emptiness that war, migration, and loss leave behind. A new layer of memory is created, for example, when someone builds a new life in a different place, but it can also be passed on through the language and culture of previous generations. In the three chapters of this project, Alfraji explores the intercultural influences, cultural identity and layered memory of his own family history and also, more generally, of people who have had to flee their country.
