“I don’t want anything I make to be still. My objects must not die. Instead I want to keep them permanently in a state between birth and death.”
Ayman Yossri has lived almost all his life in Jeddah and identifies with Saudi Arabia but is in fact a Palestinian with Jordanian nationality. This sense of national dislocation has an effect on his artistic production. Yossri’s studio in Jeddah could stand alone as a work of art. It is a monument to the marginal and eccentric artist. Yossri’s work is characterised by his desire to create situations rather than produce discrete commodities designed to be hung, bought and sold.
One of his contributions to ‘Edge of Arabia’ is Maharam: On the surface of each tissue box is a poster advertising a classic Arabic film from the 1940s or 1950s. Most nights Yossri returns to this fictional, mostly black-and-white world of film where nothing changes. Often he weeps. As he does he reaches for the nearest tissue-box. In Arabic the word maharam can relate to both tissues and your close family. Both provide an emotional blanket against the world beyond.
Identity Shop is Yossri’s other contribution to ‘Edge of Arabia’. Similar to many of Yossri’s works this piece does not involve a finished artistic commodity. Instead, we witness exchange. Yossri wants to trade identities and ideas during the course of the exhibition making this perhaps the ultimate expression of the ideals behind this exhibition: to create meaningful dialogue between Saudi artists and a British art-going public.
