In the head's sunrise

In the Head’s Sunrise

Brief Histories, NYC, December 8, 2022 - January 28, 2023
Curated by Fawz Kabra

Three heads walking between towns, and. 2022

Detail. Three heads walking between towns, and, 2022
Oil on canvas, conté stick, Band-Aid
65 x 109 inches

Finally, someone reached out and tore the head off, soda pop came out from the scalp. I don’t know, and I don’t know who they are... –AE

Ali Eyal’s paintings are characterized by their intense subjectivity that bring forth fragmented narratives and surreal visual scenes and compositions. Retrieved in tangled strands of hair or found on the path illuminated by the headlights of a pick-up truck, figures appear, searching for something or someone that is missing; they cover their faces, they run, their apparent movement obscures their features. Eyal’s works piece together memories, dreams, and stories that reach into one another and across media, rendering incomprehensible violences and unfathomable events witnessed in the artist’s hometown, a place he calls small farm. Set against the impossible scale of calamity in war, Eyal gives curious attention to the intimate, and often absurd, accounts to be found in this concentrated space. He arranges these intersecting narratives, and swiftly, he captures a moment or a gesture, like an artist in a courtroom, sketching the chronicles as they unfold. He draws everything he can see until the flashlight’s glow no longer illuminates the view and the image breaks off into darkness.

Installation view

An artist and poet, Eyal’s text is an extension of his drawings and a thread to his paintings that return as narrative links in his performances and videos. In the contemporary novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi stitches together a portrait of a land in horrific turmoil through the creation of a monster made from corpses found among the mayhem in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq. This modern Prometheus resurrects a creature to stir those in power to care about the dead, unwittingly giving the possibility that the disappeared might return. Eyal’s artworks, too, build up a landscape of disappeared memory, torn, stitched, sewn, and wrapped back into each other. In the video installation The Blue Ink Pocket, and (2022), the narrator describes finding disparate paintings of body parts, “We stumbled upon the left ear inside the bag of rice. We retrieved the painting of the head from inside the abandoned storage. The right ear from under the stairs. The shoulders and the hands we found inside the jacket. And we found the feet stuffed inside the cotton.” He recounts the pieces, removing them from their hiding place one at a time.

Installation view

New Update, and. 2022