Stories From the City

Mezquitas de Puerto Rico, 2014

This collaboration between Alia Farid and Jesus ‘Bubu’ Negrón involves documenting mosques in the Caribbean and especially Puerto Rico that have then be interpreted as tapestries by weavers living and working in the Arab Muslim world. The work looks at how traditional Islamic architecture is adapted to the context of the Caribbean through exaggerations of elements such as the dome and minaret, and issues related to the paradisiacal environment or jannah-like setting in which they are found. The work also examines connections between Latin America and the Arab world that are less visible in the work: colonial histories, histories of resistance, exile, displacement, and recent de-colonial struggles.

Trembling Landscape (Damascus), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Tehran), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Algiers), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Erbil), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Mekkah), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Beirut), 2014
Lithographic Prints and Archival Ink Stamps
40 x 60 cm or 70 x 100 cm (Beirut) (each)
Edition of 7 + 2 AP (each)

Exhibition views: Trembling Landscape, Sep. 2020 – Jan. 2021, Eye Filmmuseum © Studio Hans Wilschut

In Trembling Landscapes, a series of ink-stamped aerial maps of Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Erbil, Mekkah, and Tehran, Ali Cherri highlights fault lines that have resulted in catastrophic earthquakes, juxtaposing them with instances of political unrest and architectural development. The maps are reminiscent of well-known photographs of cities destroyed in the Second World War, or more recent image filmed by hovering drones, but without a clear reference about whether the given city is in the state before or after the catastrophe. What they offer though is retrieval of memory that we share and too often suppress, as well as a possibility to transform this information into a metaphor for the unrest that envelops those cities ceaselessly.
In the most recent addition to this series, he explores the Islamic holy city of Mekkah, focusing on an invisible fissure associated with a religious fable about a vision of the Day of Judgment that portends a violent earthquake, where people will be raised from the dead, and give account of themselves to receive their just rewards—a commentary on the town’s rapid construction and the corresponding erosion of its heritage.

Le Marché Oriental, 2009
HD video, color, sound
3 min
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Exhibition views © Anthea Pokroy

A 2-minute intervention inside Cape Town’s disused Oriental Plaza, an Apartheid-era shopping mall designed to control Cape Malay trade. On the 4th day of Ramadan, 2008, Sheikh Mogamat Moerat of District Six’s Zeenatul Islam Majid mosque was invited to sing the Adhan (call to prayer) inside the empty remains of the building a few weeks prior to its demolition to make way for luxury apartments.
District Six was one of the most politically-charged areas in South Africa. Created as the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867, its central location and proximity to the harbour made it the home of many merchants, freed slaves and immigrants. It was a racially-mixed neighbourhood comprising a high percentage of Malay people, brought, along with Islam, to the Cape Colony by the Dutch East India Company. On the 11th of February 1966, under the Group Areas Act, the Apartheid government declared District Six an area for the use of whites only. Over the next few years, 60,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to distant areas such as the Cape Flats and Endabeni. Much of the rezoned land was bulldozed, leaving only the places of worship. These included the Zeenatul Islam Majid mosque, one of the oldest in the country.