“It was more to do with feeling that I was alone with my ideas and way of seeing. That no-one understands. That’s not to say I’m a moody person, but sometimes the art I make is.”
Born in 1969, Mahdi Al-Jeraibi has lived much of his life in Makkah. He graduated from the School of Fine Art, Riyadh, in 1989 and now works as an art instructor in Jeddah. He is supported by the Al Mansouria Foundation who have coordinated several of his exhibitions. Zincographs and Dialectics are the two series Al-Jeraibi has contributed to ‘Edge of Arabia’.
In each ‘zincograph’ hairs cut from the head of the artist’s wife, his friends, or any one of from an anonymous mass of pilgrims on hajj have been suspended around a wooden frame. We see curiously intimate portraits of people the viewer may never meet – and would not recognise if they did. Contained in each hair is the DNA of the subject allowing these works to act as giant slides waiting to be examined beneath a microscope.
Originally part of a schooldesk, each board in Dialectics was once in use in a classroom in a secondary school in Makkah. Rather than hang them himself Al-Jeraibi has chosen to leave these wooden planes in Hessian sacks. The audience is invited to hang them on the wall opposite. In this way members of the audience form their own relationship with what is left of these desks. Together they form a mosaic of shared memory. By presenting the work like this the artist brings to life and heightens the dialectic between not only artist and viewer, but viewer and work.
