'Where is Amman'

Real estate was the reason and the reason was real estate: Architect/Artists Dina Haddidin and Saba Innab

Does a collective fluency in the concept of reconstruction (sometimes in the wake of demise) lead to a perception of progress that is defined only by new construction?

This question seems to be floating high above Dina Haddadin’s multi-layered rumination on space in Amman and her imaginings of a future fantasy of how people might relate to it. The tools she uses in her paintings are the ones available to her in her day job. Like many artists in Amman, Haddadin works.

She is an architect and her firm plans the same construction projects that she paints. At once accepting and critical of the kinds of projects she gets paid to do, Haddadin finds, among current urbanization and construction projects, tools that allow her (and us) to reclaim these developed spaces for ourselves. Or as she puts it, she invites us to find our “proof of existence in a concrete mixer or a scaffold or a crane.”

Her paintings draw us into dialog with the architectural visions of her company (and others) by incorporating construction materials into the construction of images. The images depict machines and building materials. The paintings are similar to the unfinished buildings, made of the same things: concrete, chalk and paint. But in these paintings it is her hand rendering these spaces, many of which seem suspended between construction and ruin. In Haddadin’s monochromatic renderings, rebar can resemble decapitated Corinthian columns.

As a result, these concrete paintings seem physically heavy, their gravity drags down the wall. Of what are the walls in the gallery made? Can they safely hold these paintings, these heavy documents of the construction of the present? Or under their weight, will these walls eventually peel away and reveal what is underneath? And what is underneath? More concrete? Stone? Decay?

The question of the strength of the walls that surround us is addressed in a tower that Haddadin built in the gallery from a stack of old newspapers she found in an abandoned construction site. In contrast to some of the shiny new buildings presumably built at the sites Haddadin uses as source material, this structure is comprised on nothing more than history. The newspaper-walls recount stories from the 1970s and they flow to the side as one passes them. Building on history can be a fragile process and, sometimes, just as disorienting as ignoring it: a faded picture of Yasir Arafat; headlines of conflicts that sound familiar to the news today; cartoons depicting corrupt leaders. When are we? Where are we?

How do we cope with change, especially when change sometimes masquerades as the status quo? Is new necessarily better? The construction of the tower, as private as a time machine, provides a space for reflection on a past that is lit by a

recurring (barely legible) video projection that resembles paint spilling down walls or a hand pushing away sand. The footsteps in the sand just outside seem to be gently buffing the jagged edges of the incongruities between what is remembered and what is remembered again. Change is ambiguous. Nothing is forgotten.

The most complex and, I would argue, quietly optimistic work in the show is a video installation in the room next to the newspaper structure. A video projection illuminates with footage from a site of a renovation of the Rainbow Cinema Hall in Amman. We see the space from the perspective of what might be the placement of a security camera in a site that looks to be undergoing renovation. Facing the projection is a desk with a monitor, headphones and a camera. The monitor and headphones play conversations with people whose faces are cut off by the frame. The conversations reconstruct memories of the cinema and echo against the sound of the space itself.

When a viewer sits at the desk, his/her image, whose face is also cut by the frame, is projected on top of the surveillance of the cinema reconstruction site in such a way that they look woven together at points. The viewer becomes a part of multiple broken conversations: with the speaker on the monitor, with the construction site, even with his or her own reflection. The layers of surveillance, and the stripping of faces, leads one to a suspension in a space we can see and hear but not access.

In this installation, the disembodiment and sadness a viewer feels over the loss of what once was a public space (where, Haddadin notes, anyone could come to sit and watch a film) is accompanied by a physical residue of history, an opportunity to travel back in time to imagine a different narrative for how time might have aged this place. I am reminded, in Lacan’s writings, of the moment of exuberance a child feels when he first sees his own reflection in a mirror; the potential to rule over the image of himself, to control fate, is intoxicating. A subsequent disillusionment ensues when the child sees his mother and realizes, in fact, he cannot control everything. By suspending us where she does in time and space, Haddadin is rewinding the tape, skipping over the nostalgia for what once was and allowing us to return to witness that first moment of intoxication without the subsequent loss. She brings us back to a time when the fate of this building was not yet written.

A question is extracted from an original context and left to linger in the musty air of the installation: What follows deconstruction? Rather than dwelling on the nostalgia of what lies in ruins, we are invited to enter them, to play among them, to imagine the elements of reconstruction (of a building, a conversation, oneself, a land), to believe we can invent the world anew. The history of this space is still alive even as it changes, disintegrates, is destroyed, gets buried. We may not be able to go back and take control of history but, aware of what possibilities there once were, we can still make stuff out of the leftovers. Even a broken mirror reflects.

One does not leave Transit with a clear agenda, but rather a sense of possibility.

No matter how huge or shiny or imposing these new buildings being built nearby are, where we put our bodies is still a revolutionary act. Suspending us in a state of lightness, playfulness (present in the faces of the workers in some of the paintings even as they struggle to survive) among these physically and historically trying circumstances is no small victory. Just a few days after the opening of Transit, another show, Saba Innab’s installation at Makan House, starts where Haddadin ends, defying gravity and leaping into thin air.

Innab is also an architect and used a residency at Makan to explore language, public space in Amman and how it relates to the independent art space. Her “intervention” begins when you enter the gallery and are confronted with a clear wall on which is printed the Arabic word for “General.” Behind this wall or window is a patch of fresh grass, reaching almost to the edges of the gallery.

Innab notes that in Arabic, there is not a clear translation for “public”, that the word for “general” is the closest word, and so the wall’s clarity is obscured by confusion, first of the relationship of the word to the space and second of the act of showing us a lush patch of grass and making it impossible for us to access it (initially at least; one can access the grass from another entrance). It is both an urban oasis and an urban mirage. I felt this tension even when I was standing next to the grass, tiptoeing around it at first, as though I should not step on it, until I saw others laying on top of it.

Located in a private home but open to the public, the site of this installation raises questions about the status of an place like Makan. What is allowed?

Before we can imagine an alternative to construction as a form of progress, we first have to find spaces in which to imagine them; where are these spaces in Amman? In a mall? A garden? Wakalat street? An opera house? The inside of a home? Do we have to drive there?

Innab has created both a blueprint and a model for that space, by providing us with grass on which we can sit and daydream looking up and, in the other room of her installation, from the eyes of a bird looking down. Here, she has cut and pasted photographs and drawings into a mural-sized collage of an imaginary Amman. In her world, Amman’s hills are connected by ladders, ropes, bridges; the city ends at the sea. People can walk high above the streets and see and be seen.

I sense that Innab’s ropes and ladders may be an ironic comment on the extent to which people must contort themselves in order to be “in public” in Amman.

Like clowns in a circus, we tread precariously through public space for fear that we may be left alone, or tumble, or worse. It is ridiculous that one must not only enter a private art gallery in order to sit on a patch of grass but that one is initially prevented from accessing it by a sign or a wall. Even the language itself must do

flips to accommodate a notion of the public.

But in Innab’s imaginings, there is also another possibility. What if the hills were connected, all the way to the sea? In both Innab’s and Haddadin’s exhibitions, the idea of change is worthy of our gaze but maybe it is not so complicated after all. Maybe construction is not the answer; maybe connection is. Not the kind of storybook East-West connection that proponents of the new Opera House claim (the audience for opera in Amman seems rather limited) but connection among neighbors, among neighborhoods, among people. Amman has long served as a refuge for those seeking to build new lives and for some, this desire to start over has translated into a formula for how to improve the city: build more buildings.

But buildings separate. What is missing in Amman may not be new buildings but an invisible architecture: ways to connect people’s lives and spaces where people connect to each other. In these two exhibitions, public access is the problem, not real estate. Perhaps an antidote to the compulsive need to construct is a questioning of the motives of development and an architectural acknowledgement of what material already exists here.

There is one of Haddadin’s paintings that continues to haunt me. It is a long painting that shows workers having a lunch break at a construction site. In other pictures of the workers, they do not look weak or complacent; rather, they seem more like the heroic figures from an Ayn Rand novel or from Greek mythology; Haddadin calls them “heroes” but implies that they may be pawns in a larger project, struggling to find a way to survive. This image is painted from an innocuous snapshot, unlikely to strike the discord that it does.

What is so chilling about the image is that the workers are smiling. In the face of such powerlessness over what they are making with their own hands, why are they smiling? Maybe they know something that we do not, after all, the fate of these buildings is literally in their hands. Or maybe we are them, seduced by the fantasy of the structures into complacency. Like one of her cement mixers, the question churns over and over…

How can we resist?

How can we resist?

How can we resist?