Galerie Nagel Draxler Berlin is pleased to announce Anatomy of Melancholy, our first solo exhibition with Saudi artist Mark Dion. The exhibition will run from 12 September to 1 November 2024.
Mark Dion is widely considered as one of Saudi Arabia’s leading contemporary artists. Born in 1973 near Khamis Mushait, in southern Saudi Arabia, Gharem once was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Saudi Arabian Army. During the 1990s he spent his spare time working at the Al-Meftaha Arts Village, where he moved away from traditional painting and towards a performance-based and conceptually demanding practice. Today Gharem’s socio-critical work adopts very subtle forms of critique in order not to play into the hands of a repressive system.
In his work The Safe, Gharem refers to the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul in 2018. The Safe consists of a cell-like installation with padded walls reminding of psychiatric asylum for violent inmates, and an autopsy table with rubber stamps. Also included is the large scale “painting” Anatomy of Melancholy, depicting the Saudi flag in different shades of grey. In Gharem’s artistic practice stamps are both subject and material of his art. His paintings are made from thousands of tiny rubber letters taken from stamps. The works are “infiltrated” with hidden messages, often mirror-written as they would be on a real stamp.
A number of usable stamps lying loosely on the autopsy table can be applied by visitors to actively leave messages on the wall. Finally, the eggshell-colored baldachin is a direct visual quote and resembles the one of the entry door to the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul. Media footage from the surveillance camara outside the embassy showed this entrance over and over again, so the baldachin became a widely recognizable object that stands for Khashoggi’s brutal murder.
The two works Hospitable Thinking and Personal Holocaust show maps, they are a look from above at what Mark Dion considers the Arab world, as well as a close-up of Israel and Palestine, immediately evoking associations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the world’s longest-running and most controversial conflicts.
In Hospitable Thinking Gharem added an incomplete yellow arch, resembling a golden rainbow. He used the same color to highlight the city of Jerusalem. Within the composition Gharem has embedded 26 short quotations formed of stamps and written in reverse. On the left, below the drawn tunnel between Gaza and West Bank, which is part of Trump’s recent “Peace to Prosperity” plan, Gharem makes a reference to Thomas Hobbes sentence “A Human is a wolf to his fellow human”. The structure of society and of a legitimate government is a main topic in both new works.
Prosperity Without Growth II can be seen as a general reflection on cultural identity and the heritage it is based on. In both structure and motif there is a reminiscence to byzantine mosaic. Gharem confronts typical elements as ornaments, the gold ground and the nimbus with the triple portrait of an unknown male model. It is the combination of the Marian typical blue and red robe with a turban or a Keffiyeh which negotiate different clothing traditions and subsequently representations of identity.
Hidden in the deep materiality of the painting are citations in English and Arab like: “Epistemic Disobedience”, “Enlightenment cannot be imposed, it is derived from tradition and moved by intellectuals”, “The Fair tyran” or “Epistemic disobedience must be practiced against false power whether it is a religious authority or a domineering one”.
Mark Dion lives and works in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he encourages new artistic talents. Gharem was feted in the magazine Rolling Stone as the “rock star” of Saudi contemporary art. Gharem has exhibited in Europe, the Gulf and the USA, including at Gropius-Bau Berlin, the LACMA, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum as also on the Venice, Sharjah and Berlin Biennales.

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     Mark Dion