Jala Wahid
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Conflagration, 2022
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Cry Me A waterfall, 2021
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Inflammatory, Revolutionary Fever, 2021
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Let Me Breathe You In Before They All Do, Tastes Like Everybody’s Fighting for You, 2021
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Let Us Speak With One Tongue, Let Our Hearts Beat as One Heart and Let Us Be Members of One Invisible Body, 2021
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Nothing but Small Wars, 2021
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‘Carved My Soul In Two, Soul Halved In Bloom’, 2021
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Anger and Euphoria, One and the Same, 2019
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Exacting Revenge Like a Wayward Flame, 2019
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Turning Fibre to Fire, 2019
Jala Wahid works across sculpture, film, sound and installation. Her work is rooted in archival research into the erased histories of Kurdish history and politics, looking at this both from the perspective of Kurdish writers and historians as well as examining the colonial rhetoric and decision-making that systematically attempted to dismantle Kurdish cultural identity. She then works from that research to make objects and films that articulate what has been erased, acknowledging that this is always a partial articulation that is felled with gaps, echoes and whispers. She often chooses a deliberately joyous or even delirious aesthetic to offer a counter-narrative to colonisers accounts and is interested in the emotive potential of Kurdish music, literature, dance and theatre. In this way her work brings together both politics and poetic expression.
Recent work by Wahid has been rooted in the incomplete and fragmentary archives of London’s Kurdish Cultural Centre as well as more official records archived by the British state. From these archives Wahid has been able to piece together the way that Britain’s relationship and political decision-making towards Kurdistan came about, in particular with relation to oil reserves. Her sculptures and installations embrace the theatrical in a way that belies the complexity of the contested histories that lie behind them. The works are deliberately alluring and sensual in part to reject the coloniser’s dry reasoning that hides decisions made on the basis of economic exploitation, in part to celebrate a cultural identity that refuses to be erased.
Jala Wahid (b.1988) lives and works in London. She received her BA from Goldsmiths College, London, and her PgDip in Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent exhibitions include solo institutional shows at Kunstverein Freiburg (2023) and BALTIC (2022-23). She has also had solo exhibitions at CAS Batumi, Georgia (2021) and Two Queens, Leicester (2022) and been in group exhibitions at Centre for Contemporary Arts Goldsmiths (2022); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Nottingham Contemporary (2019) and Arnolfini, Bristol (2019).
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Oil Aesthetics and Imperial Violence
Edwin Coomasaru, British Art Studies, March 31, 2023 -
Top Fives Shows in UK
Frieze, January 27, 2023 -
Frieze: Jala Wahid Laments Man-Made Ruin in the Middle East
Rosalie Doubal, Frieze, December 12, 2022 -
Profile: Jala Wahid
Alex Hull, Art Monthly, December 12, 2022 -
Jala Wahid: Exposing imperialism’s coverups
Sarah Jilani, Art Review Asia, November 16, 2022 -
‘Testament’ Questions the Moments We Memorialize
Tom Morton, Frieze, March 17, 2022 -
Jala Wahid’s “AFTERMATH”
Adeola Gay, e-Flux, March 4, 2022 -
These Are the Essential Artists You Need to Know Right Now
Louise Benson, Elephant Magazine, August 7, 2020 -
The Art Market | Bidding battles and gallery moves in step with uncertain times
Melanie Gerlis, Financial Times, July 30, 2020 -
Niru Ratnam Opens New London Gallery
Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper, July 17, 2020
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AFTERMATH
Jala Wahid 26 Jan - 5 Mar 2022To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it 'the way it really was'. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a...Read more -
Suture
Kobby Adi, Lydia Blakeley, Jala Wahid 15 Jul - 29 Aug 2020“Are you alive? I touch you. You quiver like a sea-fish” H.D ‘The Pool’ (1915) “Suture’s purpose is the stitching together of human consciousness in narrative” George Butte, ‘Suture...Read more
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Jala Wahid's solo exhibition 'Mock Kings' at Kunstverein Freiburg
Curated by Theresa Roessler January 13, 2023Jala Wahid April 1–May 14, 2023 How can history be told and preserved if it intrinsically eludes the Western idea of nation-statehood? How can events...Read more -
In Conversation with Jala Wahid
An evening of conversation and music around Jala Wahid’s Conflagration exhibition. January 3, 2023Jala Wahid will be in conversation with writer and historian Dr Edwin Coomasaru to discuss her new body of work, which approaches oil as the...Read more -
'Conflagration' at BALTIC, Gateshead
Jala Wahid's first solo institutional exhibition October 27, 2022Jala Wahid makes work that touches on urgent issues in relation to identity, nationhood, diasporic living and intergenerational legacies. She considers how politics and poetic...Read more -
'Testament' at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Arts, London
Adham Faramawy and Jala Wahid present new works January 21, 2022As the UK navigates seismic shifts triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental crises and Brexit, the role of monuments has...Read more