
Aicon Contemporary is honored to be exhibiting at The Armory Show 2021 with a solo presentation by Adeela Suleman.
Adeela Suleman’s fascination with violence, especially deathly violence, which is always adjunct to radical religiosity, comes from a life time spent in Karachi, Pakistan. Days there are often spent worrying about a safe route to work and back, about a child or partner who is late and not answering their phone, about little things that would not be worry-worthy in another setting.
"An entire decade of my artistic endeavour has been invested into an investigation of violence and its effect on the country and on people’s mind, and the scars it imprints on our memory and our soul. We, the artists, are at times selfish; we look at someone else’s pain and suffering, and the first thing that comes to our mind is how can we represent it visually?
The process of guilt and introspection starts immediately after we experience larger than life events. My biggest challenge has always been how to represent the un-representable in a way that it respects the victims but translates their experience to the viewers." - Adeela Suleman
Suleman takes the moments, that she has lived through and that she has others live through, and turns them into art. Her shiny, beautifully crafted surfaces of stainless steel are made up of dead birds, rendered using traditional repousse technique. These birds represent the everyday, unsung victims of violence. They come together in flowing curtains, textured surfaces that drape walls, or create free-standing forms. These shimmering towers, in their adjacency and proportions, may remind the viewer of another set of two towers, and another September in New York.