40. The Militant Revival | Artworks

I am looking to the future and this is what I see. I know, for example, that this place will not exist one day. I also know that it has been here since the beginning of mankind. Why, I wonder, does this site draw on the imaginations of every woman and man? For the hard days are just over that mountain, the siege is only a few weeks ahead and the King is behind. There is more to come: the towers will fall and the city will crumble. The desert will be taken over by jungle and water, just as faraway lands will dry up. Time: a Block Universe, when all predictions and all of our past are happening now.

This work transcends the objects. Ultimately, what I’m working with isn’t only the artefacts themselves, but the stories attached to them. For me, each tale is the manifestation of the object, and each object is a tangible materialisation of an underlying narrative. The work finds its equilibrium somewhere between the stories and chronology they’re chaptered into, the objects becoming knots or points along the timeline, woven into stories as part of the language of this artwork. Each story draws out a tale that intends to trigger imagination and memory, mixing fact with fiction, with the ultimate aim of straddling, conflating and confusing fixed notions of history to open up the unofficial histories that shape the character of place and memory.
Ahmed Mater
2014