Ameena Alali
Still from video Far & Few, Far & Few A departure with a fragmented return.
The African diaspora becomes forced, and the return becomes unavailable, then it turns into multiplicity.
As singularity is not an option, the creation of multiplicity is already in motion.
The unfamiliarity, the fragility, the void,
The arrival and departure, the closed and the conditioned force,
And the open boats sail in the black waters of the Arabian/Persian Gulf.
Upon the discovery of the oil fields in 1958 in the Trucial Coast,
The British officials imposed the abolition of slavery in exchange for economical benefits.
With that, the pearl diving industry, which was based on slavery,
Was demolished by the oil tankers,
As the slaves remained chained to the fragmented return.
My practice is focused on the politics of Afro-Arab identity in the Arabian Gulf region, specifically the history of slavery in the United Arab Emirates. I explore the ideas of self-representation and the elements of sea passage. I attempt to re-represent the findings using new concepts of togetherness and alienation in relation to sea journeys through the concept of “critical fabulation” by Saidiya Hartman. My work is grounded on creating narratives from oral history and archives in an attempt to fill the gap in history.
While I use a variety of materials and processes, each work takes a distinct approach combining research and documentation before focusing on certain aspects of social or historical importance and its relations to the unspoken history of the slave trade. In my degree project, I look at the vessels that carried on within the afterlife of slavery and the agony of the labour after the abolition of slavery in the region.