In the physically imposing and largest works in the exhibition, Fathi continues to explore and advance the qualities of assemblage. In each, the artist creates new composite worlds in which he celebrates the work of art - and life - as an accumulation of matter and experiences.
With these collages, elements such as textiles that belonged to the artist’s mother or those that have been salvaged from his children’s clothes, wrapping paper, receipts, and travel documents reside upon one picture plane. Elements from the artist's Nubian heritage are woven throughout the works: warrior heads, temples, buildings, boats - and the flowing waters of the Nile.
As with the maps within The Sunderland Collection, space is flattened to understand the world, but here, the elements, now dislocated from their original context become open to more complex meanings and possibilities, that suggest alternative modes of looking at the world.
An important element of this work is text; at times actual words but more frequently made-up, tiled and repeated like bricks. This metalanguage references displacement and loss: when the Nubian region was submerged by the dammed Nile, so was its language.
Included in this series for Shifting Sands are two historical works; Immigrant Heart (2009) and Nubian Memory (2022).
