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. The first is Migrant Heart, executed by Fathi in 2009. In this poignant, gleaming work, a fragile boat traverses the blue waters of the sea, surrounded by applied materials including fabric and white glitter, and cradled by the artist's textual motifs in gold and black.
Fathi has revisited this theme in the new work The Migrant… … Where Everything is Possible (2023). Here, a solitary boat floats amid a sea of indigo paint; but the sparkle of gold and glitter on its surface hint of worth, of potential, and of finding
happiness.
The second historical work is Nubian Memory (2022). Exhibited at the Sharzhia
Biennale, this work represents the flooding of Nubia when the Nile was dammed in the
1950s, creating Lake Nassar. This event lead to the displacement of Fathi's family -
and to the painful imperative of keeping his cultural heritage alive therough the
active preservation and honouring of memory and personal identity.
