Brave Young and new

I was born in the States and I come from a Saudi background. My childhood and adolescence years were spent between America and Saudi. My family moved often and has now relocated in Europe. I went to a Saudi International school in the States and eventually graduated from an American public school.

Since I was little, I have had to face the challenge of acclimating in new environments and building connections with new places and people. Such experiences, along with coming from a background that’s made up of two vastly different cultures, has built in me this interest in the idea of home and foreignness. What enables us to create an attachment to place? Is it through relations of culture or language? Or are attachments made from our lived experiences and the things we witness and create that makes us who we are as subjects?

Settling in new places has given me the privilege of being exposed to different people and new ideas. I have memories of myself trying to connect in different contexts. This has led me to be interested in the practice of remembering and how our memories are fragmentations of our lived experiences. 

I find that it sometimes creates a feeling of dissociation with my past. My work is very much driven by that idea. I paint fragments of memory, imagination, and from photographs, I’ve taken, all merged together in one canvas.

My interest in art started as early as the age of five. In elementary school, I used to make graphic novels and sell them to classmates and other kids outside school. My dream was to become an animator. That dream developed into being a multimedia artist once I started a painting degree at a college in America. 

The technique I created in my work is to produce a repetitive motion, whether a glitch of the painting itself, or an object, or manipulating light and projecting it onto the painting. There is something surrealist in repetition whether in movements or sound that I find intriguing. I wrote my BA thesis on technology’s role in the unconscious mind, suggesting that it’s a contemporary way of surrealist art. I referenced Florian Hecker’s sound art as one of the examples of technology-based artwork. Hecker usually improvises and creates sound pieces that are dynamic, shaping the contexts of both their production and consumption, to ensure no conscious planning went through. Hecker’s sound art is eerie and rapturous, it feels endless because there is no traditional musical structure. It personally makes me feel free. I also get this feeling during live electronic music shows because of their use of looped beats. I always wanted to explore new ways in my work to extract that limitless feeling to the viewer. I care so much about creating an experience and especially one that connects us to our unconscious. Using repetitive in motion onto a still landscape is my take on exploring that. 

Most of my work is influenced by electronic music, so musicians like Rival Consoles, Jon Hopkins, Brian Eno have been inspirational to my work. I enjoy the hypnotic effect of the use of loops and repetition in songs like  Odyssey by Rival Consoles. I usually go to electronic music shows when I want to get inspired for new work. 

I also find inspiration in Matthias Weischer paintings. He has a series of work focusing on edges of corners, that are small-scale oil paintings on cardboard.  James Turrell and his use of illusion with lights, such as his work Shanta II ( blue) has also influenced my work. 

It is difficult to say, I am very hard on myself when it comes to my work. However, I consider Stupor II to be a major turning point in my work. 

I’ve recently started learning Ableton and have been working on creating an ambiance sound that would flow well with the motion projection. I see it as my next step in expanding my ideas and I am excited about it.

Yes, I am currently doing my master’s at the Royal College of Art. Having my work in an exhibition that is unrelated to school and seeing unfamiliar faces interact with it, was very important for my growth as an artist and a step that happened at the perfect time, especially having my first show with Justin Cook, who has shown me great support and is passionate about what I do . so that definitely keeps me motivated to keep going. 

I would really like to collab with electronic musicians, I feel like we might be able to create a new way of showing both live music and visual art, perhaps in an even more intimate way. 

167 Battersea High St SW11 3JS  justincookart.com