COMPACT HOME – Mixed Media by Mahmud Obaidi
The ‘flying’ Iraqi-Canadian artist Mahmud Obaidi’s new exhibition offers viable alternatives to a post-globalized art world where local singularities often contribute to a still legitimized Western centre.
The show reunites the “Compact Home” (2003) and “Disposable Home” projects (2004) and more recent work: “How Not to Look Like a Terrorist” (which will be shown at LTMH Gallery in New York this month), and the “Fair Skies®” project that has had critical and public acclaim in Art Dubai 2010. On this rare opportunity in Kuwait at the Sultan Gallery , the viewer will get the chance to judge how one artist can coincide contemporary conceptual work with aesthetic and formal art making.
Obaidi’s work addresses themes of ‘flight’ linking through his art the different meanings of the term; from that of the perpetual flight of a hyphenated Middle-Eastern artist with no place to call his own, to that of ‘flying while Arab’ and the racial profiling of a man boarding a KLM flight (aka the “Flying Dutchman”). Now that’s irony for you, not to mention word play, a bit of art on the side.
