 Ahmed
Al Bahrani Place
& Birth: Iraq-Babylon - 1965
- Academic Qualification:
Diplomat in Fine Arts Sculpture 1988 Baghdad.
- A member of Iraq Artists Association.
- A member of Iraq Plastic Arts Association.
- A member of Qatar Plastic arts Association.
- A member of International Yemeni cultural Forum.
- A teacher of Sculpture subject at the Institute of Fine Arts 1992-93-94.
- Founder of Gallery with Architectural Hazim Abu Naba Qatar.
Participation:
2003 - Contemporary
artist from Iraq - Green art gallery – Dubai.
2002 - The Exhibition of Modern Arabic Art Bissan Gallery – Qatar.
2001 - Joint Exhibition Meridian Commodore – Beirut.
2001 - Joint Exhibition City cafe- Beirut.
2001 - The Exhibition of Modern Arabic Art Bissan Gallery.
2001 - The Exhibition of Expertise Artist in the Qatar Plastic Assembly.
2001 - The Exhibition of Accession Day.
99-2000-20001 - The Exhibition of the Qatar Plastic Art, Doha.
1997 - The Exhibition of the International Yemen Cultural Forum.
1996-1998 - The Exhibition of Iraq Arts in Yemen.
.- The Exhibition of the Iraq Plastic Arts Association.
1989-1994 - The Iraq Art.
1989-1994 - Al-Wassiti Exhibition.
Personal
Exhibition:
2002 - The National
Council of Culture, Arts and Heritage, Qatar.
2002 - The French Cultural Center - Qatar Bissan Gallery.
2001 - One - Night Show Al-Fardan Gardens, Qatar.
2000 - In the House of French Ambassador - Qatar under the Auspices
PF Group of Christian Dior Jewellery.
1999 - The French cultural Center Sana’a.
1998 - Alafif Gallery Sana’a.
Acquisition:
- Museum of
modern Arabic Art Qatar
- Personal (Iraq - Amman – Sana’a - Beirut – France - Italy - Sweden
-Nader Gallery, Miami - The Dominican Republic - Germany - Austria
- Spain - and Japan).
Ahmed
Al Bahrani - Heavyweight creativity (Canvas - Art and culture
from the Middle East and Arab world, Volume 1 Issue 4, July and
August 2005)
Standing in
the middle of a building site with Ahmed Al Bahrani on a warm night
in Doha, during the creation of his now famous Olympic ring sculpture,
I realize that I have been holding my breath. Before us, and emerging
from behind some scaffolding, is a 17-metre high iron sculpture
of the Olympic rings. They stand precariously one atop the other,
making loops and perching on an undulating sway of more metal. In
the background, higher up the hill, are the outlines of the magnificent
stadium that is under construction and which will host the 2006
Asian Games. I let out a long sigh.
When it’s done, it will be encased with stainless steel”, Al Bahrani
interrupts the silence. “I didn’t want the Olympic rings to be coloured
the way they usually are. These will all be a shiny silver colour.”
He points to the bottom part of the sculpture. “That”, he says,
“is a sea wave, representing the geographical location of Qatar.”
I advance a few steps and look more closely at the base of the piece.
With only the beam from the car headlights to illuminate the darkness,
it’s difficult to see clearly. I turn and look at Al Bahrani. How
exactly, I ask him, do you make 20 tones of iron appear to float
off the ground like this? He chuckles. “I want people to stop thinking
of iron as something that is heavy and inflexible”, he tells me.
“I want them to see that it is fluid, that it has movement and emotion
in it.”
Later, I discover
that Al Bahrani relishes working on such a large scale, and with
material that challenges both his body and his creative spirit.
He is aware that very few artists choose to sculpt with iron. “I’m
not interested in working with materials that are easy to manipulate”,
he says. “I love using iron, even if it is physically very demanding
and takes a lot of time. I believe it’s only natural that sculpting
should involve a good measure of manual labour.”
Perhaps it is also only natural that Al Bahrani, who left his native
lrak 12 years ago to avoid persecution and has yet to return, should
seek to test himself against high odds. He is, after all, no stranger
to difficulty.
Born in Babel
in 1965, the young Al Bahrani used to mould figures out of the clay
that lay on the banks of the Euphrates by his home. As a teenager
he dreamed of going to Baghdad to study at the Fine Arts Institute.
“I knew that going to the big city to study was going to be a make
or break situation for me, but I had my family’s support and I was
determined to do it.” At 16, he was one of 3000 hopefuls to take
the institute’s entrance exam and only one of 12 to get in. Even
as a student, Al Bahrani knew that in order to remain true to himself
as an artist he would have to keep defying what had become conventionally
acceptable. He worked hard and received the approbation of his teachers,
but soon discovered that he would have to move beyond what they
had to offer him. “The great lraqi sculptor, lsmail Fattah, had
a great influence on all of us and it would have been difficult
for any emerging artist to stray far from his orbit”, Al Bahrani
says. “One day, Fattah told me that he felt I had managed to escape
his influence and that is when l felt l was really getting somewhere.”
Once he had
completed art school and set out to make a name for himself in lraq,
Al Bahrani realised that if he was going to make a living as an
artist, he had only one of two choices: either to work under the
tutelage of the regime and compromise his artistic freedom, or leave
the country and try to make it independently. He chose the latter,
knowing full well that it would not prove the easier choice. “We
were being buried alive in lrak”, he says. “You couldn’t breathe
without them knowing about it. Even our shadows were being watched
by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
He is reluctant
to elaborate on the first year he spent away in Amman, saying only
that it was much more difficult than he had imagined it would be.
Al Bahrani went on to Yemen, then to Qatar and finally to Sweden,
where his wife and children now live. At first, it was a question
of trying to make enough money to feed and clothe his family. “lt
was very difficult. In the beginning, people ran away when they
saw my work, but I managed to find a public in the end. I believe
it’s up to the artist to educate the public eye to take in new things
and to appreciate them.”
There is no
false modesty in Al Bahrani’s confidence. He says it is his strong
conviction that he was doing what was right for him which eventually
made people recognize his work. “lf you want to do really creative
work as an abstract artist, you have to be prepared to suffer the
consequences. People may not like your sculptures in the beginning.
They may even label you as crazy, but you still have to go on with
your role as an agent for change. You have to turn the negative
into a positive.”
Changing the
traditional symbols that the public is comfortable with and creating
something new and unused does not necessarily mean denying one’s
culture, Al Bahrani continues. "Local culture definitely affects
my work, but art itself does not have a nationality. I respect my
culture and want to preserve my heritage and feel that the symbols
we have inherited from the past need to be employed in a universal
way. I am very lucky because I have had the opportunity to travel
a great deal and to be exposed to the work artists are doing beyond
my own country.”
Since the early
1990s when he first left Baghdad, Al Bahrani has exhibited his sculptures
around the region, including in Dubai, Lebanon and Yemen, among
other countries, and his pieces have sold to private collectors
around Europe, as well as in the United States and Japan. The commission
to design the sculpture at the entrance to the Olympic Stadium in
Qatar is an indication of how successful Al Bahrani has been in
penetrating mainstream culture and in introducing a new perspective
for abstract art in the region. He argues that art reflects the
nature of a society and that the achievements of a civilization
are measured by the work its artists produce.
That is why
he never takes his work lightly, but spends a great deal of time
before executing a sculpture, ruminating on an idea, working out
how he can leave his individual mark on it. “Success is a big responsibility”,
he says. “lf there is any piece in an exhibit that people don’t
seem to enjoy, I go back and think about it, about Whether or not
I can improve on it.”
Despite the
‘futuristic’ nature of Al Bahrani’s sculptures – he is determined
to do work that will continue to appeal to the public years from
now – there is also something very primitive about them. Perhaps
it is in the rawness of the materials he chooses and in the almost
familiar, pliable yet solid shapes he moulds. Perhaps it is in the
sheer size and weight of his endeavours, the physical effort they
suggest, in the implication that here man has definitely triumphed
over matter. Or is it that the sculptor manages to not only pull
iron out of its rigid perception of itself, but also to push us
forward, towards a purer vision of beauty and of our own understanding
of it?
There is no
denying the strength of Al Bahrani’s will and enthusiasm. He lives
and breathes his art and says that he even dreams about it at night.
He says there are no limits to his ambition and to his energy to
keep on producing work and to exhibit it even further afield. He
is also anxious to impart what he has learned to fellow Iraqi artists,
those who did not have the opportunities he has had and had to practice
their art within the narrow framework of an authoritarian state.
“There has to be some way we can help artists who stayed in Iraq
to regain the balance they lost because of the oppression they suffered,
and to become familiar with a much wider artistic perspective.”
Al Bahrani plans
to return home soon, one day. In the meantime, he says that nothing
will stop him continuing to move forward and giving his very being
to his art. “I leave nothing inside myself. I keep working, produce
a piece and put it aside before moving on to the next one. And despite
all that I’ve done so far, I feel I’ve still got a lot more to achieve.”
The
Dynamism of Iron Works by May Muzaffar
Few years ago
Ahmed Al-Bahrani’s works began to attain a remarkable presence through
his characteristic abstract sculptures to occupy a distinguished
position among the works of Iraqi contemporary sculptures, inspiring
a new spirit of artistic activity that has been recently marked
with stagnation. These abstract works may add a new chapter to the
history of modern sculpture in Iraq since they have been freed from
the influence of the predecessors and departed from the scope of
forms that are based on the various shapes of the living beings.
Al-Bahrani has managed to create abstract compositions that seem
to be mentally conceived and which are characterized by both clarity
and simplicity. What is striking about Al-Bahrani's sculptures,
whether round or relief, is that they challenge space as much as
they challenge material, and that they penetrate the subconscious
of the viewer with a halo of calm beauty that stems from their reduced
forms.
His compositions look as if they do not belong to anything but their
geometrical – or pseudo-geometrical shapes, yet they are empowered
with hidden meanings that do not reveal themselves except to perceptive
eyes and contemplative minds. Besides, these works, by no means,
reveal the artist’s technical competence, high command and deep
understanding of the basic principles of the art of sculpture which
he originally obtained when he was an apprentice-student in the
Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad.
Al-Bahrani depends on an imagination rich with scenes and events
that have been accumulating from his early childhood in his home
town on the banks of the Euphrates. Being aware of the latest developments
in international sculpture and its modern concepts and techniques,
he tries to reach a compromise by subjecting the solid material
to the flow of the ideas and images that haunt his mind. Therefore,
iron, whether mass or plate, seem to respond to such ideas and images
that have been engraved in his memory, and which he keeps recalling
from places faraway.
Although these works follow the techniques of modern Western sculpture
and make use of Western theories, they essentially derive their
characteristics from the artist’s personal experience. His forms
are not divorced from their strict geometrical molds, nor do they
abolish their origins which are derived from flexible natural elements.
While his sculptures are based on the circle, the square and the
rectangle, his contents derive their images from earth, space and
sea; they are essential sources for the implications found in these
forms. Among his compositions there are waving metal ribbons forming
bands that seem to embrace the ground while extending in different
directions to penetrate the space as if they were rays of flowing
light or water waves vibrating in an imagined sea. That what makes
these sculptures capable of becoming harmonized with the place,
and capable of being part of nature or even a complementing element
to that nature. Besides, Baharani’s cubic, circled or other forms
maintain some sort of movement and flexibility. This dynamism is
capable of making his colorless abstract solid forms enriched with
an aesthetic power.
The relief works, hanged on the walls, are used as surfaces on which
the artist engraves different shapes and symbols, of inherited folkloric
or religious origins, arranged in systematic units depending on
repetition and analogy. According to Al Bahrani, these signs are
relevant to man’s hand marks. Shadow and light seem to interact
in those surfaces to create a highly expressive sense of beauty.
Perhaps, Al-Bahrani wanted to paint, sculpt and write at the same
time borrowing his symbols from the environment he grew up in, where
he first practiced his artistic vocabulary on the mud of the Euphrates
banks, shaping his forms and giving them names when he was a child
with nothing to play with except the river side that responded to
his imagination.
From playing with mud to playing with iron Al-Bahrani’s artistic
journey moves towards a further promising wealth of production.
This balance between the utilization of international techniques
and expressing images of deeply rooted implications, has enabled
the artist, through hard work and complete dedication, to make a
breakthrough in modern art history in Iraq and to achieve his own
characteristics which, though in its early stages, may constitute
an immense and self-imposing achievement in contemporary sculpture
among Arab artists.
►► Some
of the artist's artwork
Contact:
editorial@onefineart.com
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