BERLIN.- Saba Innab’s solo exhibition Station Point, curated by Omar Berrada, is a response to ifa Gallery Berlin’s one-year programme Untie to Tie - Movement.Bewegung.
In technical drawings, a station point is the point from which a perspective is constructed. Anything that is located behind it, or in its blind spot, will be absent from the drawing. Innab’s Station Point probes spatial representation as a way to reflect on the entanglements of architecture and power. The exhibition unfolds across three chapters that organize the gallery space.
The show opens on a personal note, with a letter from Saba Innab to Malevich, highlighting the blind spots of European avant-gardes and registering the impossibility of love between a Palestinian architect and the modern art movements that nourished her education.
The second chapter, composed of a sketchbook, a drawing, and several small architectural models, moves from intimate intuition to historical investigation. From Renaissance “ideal cities” to modern colonial settlements, Innab traces architectural authority through the persistence of central perspective as a mode of visual framing that has continuously produced spatial and legal marginalization.
Is there a way out of the frame? The third chapter attempts an answer. A set of columns and beams constructs a single vanishing point. Not a specific structure but perspective itself as structure. At its base lies a ruin made of claustra blocks, cut and arranged in a set of underground tunnels and inverted domes reclaimed from a buried history of vernacular construction. Upon looking at this landscape, one´s gaze is systematically interrupted. Such fugitive architecture evades visual control. By experimenting with material and form, the artist turns vulnerability into a proposition for an alternative politics of space. Within an uninhabitable world, the exhibition makes a plea for dwelling otherwise.
Saba Innab (b. Kuwait, 1980) is an architect, urban researcher, and artist practicing out of Amman and Beirut. Through mapping, model making, design, and drawing her work explores the suspended states between temporality and permanence, and is concerned with variable notions of dwelling and building and their political, spatial and poetic implications in language and architecture.
Omar Berrada (b. Morocco, 1978) is a writer and curator, and the director of Dar al-Ma’mûn, a library and artists residency in Marrakech. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series.
Omar Berrada is a grant holder of the Curators in Residence programme of KfW Stiftung in cooperation with ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen). The programme offers curators from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia the opportunity to spend three months in Berlin, thus promoting intercultural and discursive exchange in exhibition organisation. The residency’s purpose is to raise critical awareness of postcolonial discourses and encourage intellectual engagement with cultural heritage.
Resonances is a space for research and encounter at ifa Gallery Berlin reflecting each chapter and exhibition of Movement.Bewegung. In the context of Station Point, Resonances (conceptualized by Nikola Hartl) addresses the connections between modernity and coloniality, architecture and power and how their effects contrast with the experience of flight, exile, and landlessness.
