Sites of Memory, Sites of Amnesia

Abdullah Al Saadi's poetic, expansive, and complex practice dwells outside the Western canons of contemporary art. Rather than attempt to box it within categories and labels, we grant the catalog's readers the privileged possibility of witnessing and following the journeys.
Al Saadi is a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, alchemist, memory carrier, and storyteller. At the heart of the publication is the first comprehensive and consequential chronicle of eight journeys in the wilderness, the beings and objects that accompanied him, and the sensate record of his experience. Each journey's chronicle becomes manifest in formally and materially distinct ways, which the artist packs and stores differently each. 
In his work, the landscapes are manifested in maps like drawings; they are as many representations of a place as they are inscriptions of time because these landscapes are at once elusive and timeless. Al Saadi's travel companions are animals (a donkey, a bird, a chicken, a dog), they appear in these chronicles to form a lively and protective bestiary. These, as other markings, signs, and codes in the chronicles, are in a vivid, playful, and potent conversation with the rich tradition of medieval Arab travel literature that intersected between geographical exploration, poetry, and fantastical literature. Al Saadi's practice resonates powerfully with the legacy of classical Arab poets, whose wanderings in the natural expanses of the Arab Peninsula were often incarnated in a poem.