Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land

From chamberpots paired with Georgian silver to the reimagining of the story of Jacob and Esau, the two artists, working together for the first time, point up multiple dualities and inequalities

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Fly Tip, 2024. Scavenged possessions, loose fibres, latent prints, trace evidence (hair, paint chips, insects etc), miscellaneous residues (cigarette ash, arsenic contaminants, urine etc.), aluminium bag, impulse seal, vacuum pack. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

Spike Island, Bristol
28 September 2024 – 19 January 2025

by TOM DENMAN

By the entrance, close to the fire extinguisher and a rack of folding chairs, is a pile of magazines, all copies of the Spectator. The politically conservative magazine is somewhat out of place at Spike Island, a free-to-enter, non-commercial contemporary art gallery, which can only mean that the copies are an artwork. It is titled Terra Nullius (2024), Latin for “nobody’s land”, and intervenes in one of the magazine’s (open) pages as an advertisement “Seeking English landowners burdened by carrying costs to participate in an endeavour of artistic significance”. The problem of England’s grossly unequal distribution of land ownership reaches back to the age of feudalism, and is rooted in the same archaic mindsets the Spectator may be seen to foster. But the work calls for something more open-ended than correcting this inequality: a questioning of land ownership altogether, something this show does in myriad ambiguous ways.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Terra Nullius, 2024. Magazine, paper, plastic straps. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

As I wander around Grey Unpleasant Land – conceived by Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane, here working as a duo for the first time – the word that keeps coming to my mind is seamless, with the wall texts functioning as para-literary extensions of the works as opposed to adjunct explanations, the works cleverly embedded in the gallery’s architecture and administrative functioning. And yet, perhaps consequentially, it also constantly spills beyond itself – for instance, the phone number provided in Terra Nullius, which takes you to Spike Island’s reception desk, has been called more than once. Thus is created a thematically germane relationship between inside and outside, between the habits of art viewing and the habits of everyday life. I want to say it’s an exhibition that we inhabit.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Curtains, 2024. Velvet, brass. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

It consists mainly of immersive readymades (which immerse the viewer either by referencing an imaginary habitus or physically enveloping them, or both), each presented with an acute aesthetic awareness, which itself incrementally accrues layers of meaning. Curtains (2024) hangs on a brass pole; the ruddy, sun-bleached velvet is mysterious, perhaps even liturgical. The wall text – placed a good few paces away from the work, encouraging a visual encounter at a spatiotemporal remove from any verbal explanation – is terse, saying only that the curtains were found outside a property in Belgravia, which is enough to further animate the fabric’s hauntology. I am reminded of the sculptures of Lili Dujourie, whose undulations of velvet dislodge them from any fixed place in time.1 Belgravia, known to be one of London’s most affluent districts, is mostly owned by the Duke of Westminster – who also, moreover, owns many ancestral portraits backdropped with velvet drapery. This does not necessarily put a negative spin on my encounter; rather, it tunes my awareness to the fraught ambiguities of looking at ownable things.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Job Lot, late 1700s-2024. An inheritance of 240 porcelain chamber pots, acrylic newspaper clip, frame. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

Occupying much of the exhibition’s central room are 240 porcelain chamber pots, meticulously regimented on the floor. The term “ain’t got a pot to piss in”, with all its connotations of destitution and homelessness, comes to mind. The pots are beautiful, and yet this beauty demarcates a social division between their users – who had the privilege of identifying with their beauty – and the servants who washed them. Al-Maria and Ourahmane point out an additional social discrepancy by juxtaposing the pots’ subsequent history with that of another set of objects. As storied in a newspaper clipping on the wall, Graham Randles inherited the pots from his publican parents and then sold them, to the artists, via Facebook. Titled Job Lot (late-1700s-2024), the work is shown next to Silver Service (1774-2024), consisting of a collection of Georgian silver once belonging to Sir William Bellingham. The high-status circumstances of this latter collection made it a bureaucratic nightmare for the artists to acquire (at the time of viewing, the chests had yet to arrive), mapped by a paper trail on the wall. Readymade are not only the objects at the centre of these works, but also the unequal social conditions shored up by their acquisition.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Framing Device I and Framing Device II, 2024. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

The layered transformations involved in many of the works here, beyond the Duchampian act and placing them in a gallery, can afford uplift and self-reflection. Framing Device 1 (2024) and Framing Device II (2024) consist of components used to support the Wilton Diptych (c1395-99), one of the National Gallery’s most prized possessions. The museum has lent the devices as well as its own wall labels. The lower part of the frame is positioned on a plinth (as it would normally be displayed, to allow viewers to see both sides), with the top bar hanging above it, almost as if it were suspended, like in one of Takis’s telemagnetic sculptures, by an invisible force – as if the work were capturing the rawness of the absent images, whose subject is none other than the power of kingly lineage, and this alone were holding the components in place. Sustaining the work is the way the illusion occurs less through optical trickery than through the value we might place, rightly or wrongly, in what we know is represented by the empty space.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Birthright, 2024. Scottish sandstone, wood pallet, plastic wrapping, styrofoam, permanent marker. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

Birthright (2024) and A Blessing and a Betrayal (2024) also operate in tandem. The former consists of sandstone blocks stacked on a pallet, which, the wall text explains, share “the same geological origin” as the Stone of Scone, a bitterly contentious artefact originally used in coronation rites in Scotland before it was sequestered by the English king Edward I in 1296, only returning to Scotland permanently on the 700th anniversary of this event, while still being used in the coronation of King Charles III in 2023. The text also explains that an alternative name for the Stone of Scone is “Jacob’s Pillow”, referring to the rock on which the biblical Jacob slept when, in a dream, God promised him the land of Luz, located in the present-day Palestinian West Bank. The apparent banality of the blocks reduces their mythic value to the bare material components (as if to say, “It’s only a rock”) and, conversely, emphasises the power of history and ritual in bestowing this transformational value to them.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. A Blessing and a Betrayal, 2024. Steel frame, glass, silver nitrate, grisaille. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

This latter effect is felt all the more potently after encountering A Blessing and a Betrayal, which has its own room, on the skylight of which the artists have used a medieval staining technique to depict a sun and other symbolic forms to adorn a passage of ChatGPT-generated text reimagining the story of the brothers Jacob and Esau. In this account, the latter, tricked out of his birthright by his brother, experiences a spiritual awakening in which he embraces life as a landless wanderer. An easy way to read the text is by lying – in imitation of Esau, though I am also thinking of several historic depictions of “Jacob’s Dream” – on a bench beneath it, looking up. The work is affecting not least because it involves a sort of embodied reading suited to the subject – someone who, in a dream (and what better measure of the technological unconscious is there than AI?), realises that their body is their truest abode, a realisation that many viewers might sympathise with at a time when one’s chances of owning property are increasingly slight.

Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane. Fly Tip, 2024. Installation view, Grey Unpleasant Land at Spike Island, Bristol, 2024. Photo: Rob Harris.

The show’s multiple dualities opaquely resonate with the artists’ dual practice, as if to draw links between “authorship” and “ownership”, less as a comment on this relation than to deepen the choreography of their conceptualism. The transcendental tenor of the previous two works is heightened by the additional pairing they make with the filthy, abject household objects – mattresses, sofas, chairs, a fridge door, a magnet – that Al-Maria and Ourahmane collected off the street and vacuum-packed in silver and arranged in a ritual circle in Fly Tip (2024), at the opposite end of the gallery. It is as if the Sun had been drawn close to the Earth, or we were caught in an atomic blast. What exactly is being exploded? There might not be an answer to this question, but if the meditations on Jacob and Esau spoke to the biblical past, Fly Tip could be staring precariously at the future, at an inevitable, maybe uninhabitable terra nullius, beautiful and bleak.

Reference
1. Lili Dujourie’s Images and Afterimages by Michael Tarantino, Artforum, December 1989.