DEEMA ALGHUNAIM

Records of future encounters

Fired shells, sand and clay, The Object Salon (2022 - ongoing)

Shells are washed ashore because they’re dead. Their structure is a record of environmental change, but we don’t read shells, we collect them because they’re beautiful. Reading shells or faal is an old fortune-telling practice. You throw a number of shells on the ground and their random arrangements should reflect human connections and future relations. The fortune-teller of today is perhaps an environmentalist, or Shell; the oil company. Sadaf is a word in the Arabic language that means both a shell, and a coincidence. Marcel Proust has explained in his 1913 novel "In Search of Lost Time" that: 

“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.”

If we multiply the realm of intellect, the ‘past’ in Proust's understanding of objects can alternatively be replaced with ‘future.’ At a moment by that shore, these shells will be gathered in random assemblages. I imagined that If I preserve that moment, I will produce a hybrid object; a shifter between realities. If I preserve that moment, I will acquire some clairvoyance.

My submission for The Object Salon group exhibition consisted of six sculptures and faal readings on cyanotype paper. Faal allowed the person I am reading for and myself to reflect and associate with objects outside of ourselves. Shells being common mediums to do a reading of one’s current and future life, it can also tell a lot about the condition of water where it comes from. As I read, I imagine particles of me escaping towards a future moment, but how much of the future is left for me to imagine or to keep?