Shadi Al-Atallah’s solo exhibition ‘Hole’ takes its cue from the concept of a hole being a site of transformation, production and concealment as well as where new forms of subjectivity are articulated from. In this sense the hole is not an absence or an emptiness, instead for Al-Atallah it can be a portal, a conduit, an opening of the body to the world or a space for what the subject chooses to reveal or hide. Holes are everywhere, and in that sense might be considered mundane or everyday. But holes are also places of wonder, such as the black holes in space which contain matter that has been sucked in and which curve and stretch space-time in a dramatic transformation. Absence and emptiness are reconfigured to become sites of change and pathways to potential infinity.
As with earlier works by Al-Atallah, the paintings in ‘Hole’ feature distorted figures who are seen in intimate spaces that the viewer might feel they are intruding on. Al-Atallah collects images to begin with to work from; for this series those images come from film stills, medieval diagrams of space and photos Al-Atallah has taken of windows. They then zoom in on parts of those images to remove them from their original context, fragmenting and reassembling meaning. In this series though, Al-Atallah develops their way of painting the figure. They do this by painting the surroundings around the figure first, and then let the figure then emerge from the space that is created. In this way the figures emerge from nothingness, from the hole left by the areas of paint that have preceded it. In effect the figures are held in place by that which surrounds them, in the way that a hole is held in space by the matter that surrounds it. By extension then, we might think of each of Al-Atallah’s figures as being conceptualised as a hole.
This conceptualisation echoes sentiments articulated by the artist Pope.L in his book ‘Hole Theory’ (2002). Pope.L opens:
“I don’t picture the hole/
(I inhabit it)”.
Shortly afterwards in the numbered points that make up this poetic text, the artist writes:
“Again: I do not picture the hole.
I am the hole.”
For Pope.L the hole is the site not only where ideas are produced but more specifically where the subject is sited or begins from. We are the products of our own hole rather than our surroundings. Our subjectivity creates us rather than being simply part of us. Through this we form ourselves in a liberated space which does not have to abide by the rules or the social conventions of the societal structures around us. Holes are part of a poetics of liberatory negation: “Hole theory explains nothing/This is in order to create/A platform from which/to engage everything.”
Later in the text, Pope.L’s throwaway one-liner “To each his anus” recalls an earlier text, Leo Bersani’s ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ (1987) that conceptualises the hole, and specifically the rectum, as a place where misogynistic and heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality are overthrown. Bersani considers the rectum in the context of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and his essay is a response to the resultant homophobia of the time. For Bersani, the rectum can be seen as a site of sexual pleasure where masculine ideas around “proud subjectivity” is undermined, or in Bersani’s words, “buried”. The hole then, becomes a place to rethink subjectivity, rather than merely repeat ideas of the subject that are sexist and homophobic.
A third text, ‘Testo Junkie’ by Beatriz Preciado (2008, author’s name at time of writing, now Paul Preciado) develops this notion that the hole is a site of subversion of static identities and a place where new identities can be articulated from. Preciado writes, “The hole in my body is the place where I become another. It is the space where I enter into the unknown, where my gender is neither male nor female, but something else entirely.” For Preciado the hole is physical and much as conceptual, the site of entry of the testosterone (‘T’) injections that the author is documenting through the course of the book.
The fragments of bodies that we see in Al-Atallah’s paintings might then be understood as being in the process of becoming. Seen emerging or ensconced by the holes that produced them, they refuse the idea of fixed identities and instead revel in a transitory, contingent moment. In doing so these bodies as holes which are simultaneously bodies emerging wholly or partly from holes, have agency; through the structure of the hole they reveal only what they want to be revealed. We, the viewers, seem to have inadvertently stumbled across them and there is an ambivalence as to whether we have discovered a private moment or whether we are the intended audience for the figures showing themselves to us. We are caught out by them, and they surround us. We are held in place by them.
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