When Tomorrow Arrives We Will Love Life
2024 Installation at Hamiltonian Gallery.April 11–May 4, 2024
Hold at Armpit Level (white-and-blue version)
Custom-made sign, glazed ceramic, and steel
12.5 x 60 x 48 in(31.75 x 152.4 x 121.92 cm)
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Truck Bed
Fiberglass-reinforced cement, pigment, Home Depot 5-gallon buckets, glazed ceramic, unfired clay, and one-pint paint cans
26 x 73.5 x 81.25 in(66.04 x 186.69 x 206.38 cm)
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Wall Pump
Glazed ceramic
12.75 x 10.5 x 25.5 in(32.39 x 26.67 x 64.77 cm)
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When, Love
Custom-made sign,steel
9 x 18 x 2.25 in(22.86 x 45.72 x 5.72 cm)
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Two Seats, Two Buckets
Glazed ceramic, used 5-gallon bucket, paint can
26 x 43.75 x 18.5 in(66.04 x 111.13 x 46.99 cm)
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Two Hundred Ninety-Seven Holes
Custom-made signs, steel posts, glazed ceramics, unfired clay, and screw
6 x 36 x 60.25 in(15.24 x 91.44 x 153.04 cm)
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Love, Will, Life
Custom-made sign and steel
36 x 36 x 2.5 in(91.44 x 91.44 x 6.35 cm)
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Nozzle Connector
Glazed ceramic
2 x 1.75 x 5.25 in(5.08 x 4.45 x 13.34 cm)
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Passenger Seat
Concrete and glazed ceramic
7.75 x 19.75 x 29.25 in(19.69 x 50.17 x 74.3 cm)
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The Exhibition was acompanied by an essay by Leah Triplett Harrington
Abed Elmajid Shalabi: In the Distance
Abed Elmajid Shalabi’s When Tomorrow Arrives We Love Life comprises nine elegant, spare sculptures installed at irregular intervals throughout the Hamiltonian Artists space. Each sculpture riffs on car culture and is made from a cast or literal piece of a car or truck. Gas nozzles, road signs, a truck bed, or car seats repeat throughout, but not as abstract motifs; these are actual objects synonymous with distances, journeys, and travel, which are the exhibition’s implicit themes. For Shalabi, the exhibition considers a post-oil future of the Arab world, a time at which we have yet to arrive. This anticipation is only heightened by his placement of each piece at an expanse from each other, creating a cohesive installation that hinges on distance, literally and figuratively.
The first work encountered in the installation is Passenger Seat (2024), a concrete cast of a car seat’s back cushion upside down with its headrest separated. Placed directly on the floor, a white glazed ceramic with holes punched through is placed on its top, and a severed lead pipe is laid vertically down its middle. The seams of the seat’s cast are rough-hewn, which slyly contorts time in this work as well as throughout the exhibition; the seat feels contemporary, but its craggy edges make it feel more like a ruin. One end of the pipe has a similarly riven tip as if it’s a piece pulled off of a larger whole. The tip points away from the exhibition’s second work, the wall-mounted Nozzle Connector (2024), a glazed ceramic tube stretching out from the wall like a bent finger. Closer examination reveals its geometric angles and edges, much neater than Passenger Seat, but the hole at its nozzle is nevertheless cleft. This slight detail connects both pieces formally, enabling material and conceptual relationships to coalesce naturally through the gap between them. In other words, such thematic connections only emerge for the viewer as they proceed through the exhibition. Travel is necessary.
Between spaces–and the possibilities they present–are of particular interest to Shalabi. Gas stations are one such space for him, and he worked at one after arriving in the US from Israel–Palestine, where he grew up in a Muslim family who are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Pumping gas, he saw how people of all backgrounds intermixed at the station as they all needed gas for their cars. He also observed the bravado of American car culture for the first time, with the macho-ness of big trucks or the flash of a particular status car. They all needed gas to go about their daily lives. They were therefore all dependent on oil, the economic driver of the Arab world. However, the cost of oil didn’t enrich the lives of everyday Arabs like Shalabi’s family. There was a gap between the shallow excess of car culture, oil’s financial value, and the realities of people who lived on top of petroleum.
Though Shalabi wants people to consider “the gas station experience,” their relationship to oil, and an Arab future that isn’t dependent on the globe’s reliance on it, he also asserts that his personal stories aren’t part of the work. Instead, the work is about material transformation–how one thing can become another–through his own catalytic transformation of familiar objects into casts of themselves or assemblage of found materials into something entirely new. In this way, Shalabi figuratively recasts a physical, real thing–such as a car seat–into something reimagined. This is a process akin to those of poets like Mahmoud Darwish, from which the exhibition takes its title. Considered Palestine’s national poet, Darwish was an activist for peace who wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. For Shalabi, poets and activists of Darwish’s generation represented and articulated the dreams of a future Arab world that the current world still needs to achieve.
Shalabi transforms and distorts materials poetically, but his visual language relies less on abstraction than the tangible. Throughout much of the exhibition, he uses just one cast of a car seat, but his play with color, texture, and material juxtaposition reenvisions this singular seat or rhythmic inclusion of black piping. Beyond the wall Nozzle Connector is Two Hundred Ninety-Seven Holes (2024) which picks up the thread of the pipe at its center bottom. A silvery iridescent sign typically found on highways is placed on the top edge of this black tubular form; at the top is a ceramic surface with the bumpy texture of an industrial anti-slip mat. This sign is placed on top of another road sign, a pearly white one with black edging, four bolts, and a single screw placed perpendicularly beneath it. These literal signs in turn don’t communicate any message, and as the viewer peers down to examine both signs, only the juxtaposition of material and the textures therein are visible. For instance, in place of written language, the silver sign is just a surface of slashy, gestural texture that only conveys the intrinsic material properties of the sign instead of any symbol.
Stacking abstract times and histories as well as formal lines and planes is an aesthetic tactic Shalabi uses to invert and distort symbols and the signified so that the viewer can make their own meaning. Past Two Hundred and Nine-Seven Holes the exhibition crescendos with the remaining six works, all of which similarly stack objects or symbols in a reconfiguration of the familiar into eerie relics of some timeless age. They are too identifiable to be of the past, their surfaces too worked to be pristinely futuristic, and yet too distorted to be of the present. The past, future, and present are a stack, and this timelessness imbues all these works with an elegiac quality. For instance, in Two Seats, Two Buckets (2024), two identical seats in bright yellow ceramic sit atop a used utility bucket and paint can, respectively. With an industrial sheen, the one atop the utility bucket is perched higher than that of the paint can (perhaps denoting a parent and child?). Both seats face the middle of the room as if they are for a phantom driver and passenger headed for the center of the exhibition. There, Shalabi has placed the most enigmatic work on view here, the straight-forwardly titled Truck Bed (2024). Hovering just off the floor, this fiberglass-reinforced cement cast of the middle portions of a truck bed is precariously stabilized by the orange 5-gallon Home Depot bucket at its topside, where the cast reaches up into a wheel well. In the middle of the ridged bed pokes a nozzle (a bent pipe form), its beak uselessly and vainly reaching for something. Inside the bucket is an ambiguous material in solid white, the weight of which keeps the whole structure upright. The juxtaposition of the filled bucket and the nozzle with nothing to fill, enhances the feeling of striving for, but never accomplishing; dreaming, but never attaining.
Endlessly endeavoring (which inherently means always trying, going, never stopping) is the prevailing sentiment of Darwish’s A State of Siege (2002), the poem from which Shalabi takes his title. This verse is written in Latin and Arabic along two custom-made road signs entitled When, Love (2024) and Love, Will, Life (2024). Words, like “Arrives” and “When,” are extracted, replicated, and repeated in big black and white industrial-looking letters so much that they become almost illegible. But only almost, as these words connoting journey and time are distinct from the otherwise indistinguishable mass of words. These words, along with “Love,” are clearly discernible only as empty gaps between layers and layers of letters. The viewer can see these letters only in context with their indecipherable stacks. As with the installation as a whole, the distance between things is everything.
Leah Triplett Harrington is director of exhibitions and contemporary curatorial initiatives at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
The essay was commitioned by Hamiltonian Artist Essays On Art
The exhibition was reviewed by The Washington Post
Published on April 26, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Review by Mark Jenkins
In the galleries: Mixing the macabre with views on mortality
“Most of the stuff Abed Elmajid Shalabi represents in sculpture comes from the near-universal culture of cars and trucks. But the Richmond-based Palestinian Israeli artist transfigures everyday things by reducing them to fragments and rendering them in unexpected materials. The centerpiece of his Hamiltonian Artists show is a cast model of part of a truck bed made primarily of fiberglass-reinforced concrete. The form of the bed is familiar, but it’s made of a substance over which a truck might drive, thus melding a vehicle with its environment.
The title of the show, “When Tomorrow Arrives We Will Love Life,” is taken from a poem by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish. Lines from Darwish’s verse may be featured in the text pieces Shalabi makes on metal highway signs coated with a reflective surface. It’s hard to tell, since the artist piles the words on top of each other so some can be read, yet the overall meaning is indecipherable.
Such ambiguity is typical of the sculptor’s work, which alienates items from their ordinary uses. A gasoline-pump nozzle is simulated in glazed ceramic and affixed to a wall. Two essentially identical yellow bucket seats, which look to be plastic but are also ceramic, appear unequal because they’re placed on found pedestals of different sizes. The objects Shalabi scatters around the gallery are recognizable, but they serve as signposts to an unknown journey.“
read full article
additional installation shots
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2023. installation at Lighthouse Works in Fishers Island NY.
All That's Left To Us contains ceramic sculptures of everyday safety objects and a multilingual custom-made sign. The distorted Arabic/English text in the sign pays homage to the work of the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, His 1966 book All That's Left To You addresses the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, specifically the experiences of the refugees displaced in 1948. Kanafani speaks to the experiences of loss, resilience, and resistance, offering a powerful critique of colonialism and imperialism. The installation All That's Left To Us, made half a century after his assassination points to the role of the modernization of the Arab world in the erasure of Palestinian identity By utilizing everyday safety objects such as floor mats, border signs, anti-slip stairs, safety belts, and car seats the installation aims to question the power structures that shape our relationship to the urban space in post-colonial contexts.
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All That's Left To Us, custom made reflective sign 24 x 24 in.
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Place at Armpit Level, glazed ceramic 58 × 12 × 44 in
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Anti Slip. glazed ceramic
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Diamond Flex-Lok industrial mat with holes (nr.2), glazed ceramics 48 x 36 x 3 in.
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Pump/Arrow/Black&White Floor Mat
2023 installtion at the group show “EI TOI, BENOIT?” at SARA’S Gallery in NYC.“Pump/Arrow” 2023
Glazed ceramic, steal, custom-made diamond grade 3M reflective aluminum sign, epoxy, acrylic.
36 x 36 x 24 inches
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Diamond Flex-Lok industrial mat with holes in Black & White (Floor Mat nr. 3)
Glazed Ceramic. 9ftx4ftx3 inch 2023
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You Can’t Find The Sun
2023 Installation at Hamiltonian Gallery.New.Now Exhibition.
Supported by The Foundation of Contemprary Arts Emergency Grant
The text in the work references the iconic quote by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani “ you can't find the sun in a locked room”. The original quote is spoken to the female protagonist of his short story The Little Lamp, first published in 1975, Which describes the tale of an orphan locked in a dungeon as a metaphor for the state of the Arab world. Kanafani’s work ties feminist liberation to political-revolutionary activism - a stand typical for his generation of Arab modernist thinkers that saw the patriarchal religious tradition as a barrier to decolonization. By eliminating half of Kanafani’s iconic quote, I suggest that the metaphoric finding of the sun has never happened and we, as arabs, are still in that locked room despite the illusion of advancement and oil-wealth.
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You Can’t Find The Sun
Custom Made Diamond Grade Reflective Aluminum Sign.steel.28 x 24 x 2 in.
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Driver & Passenger
glazed ceramic, fuel hose, two gas pumps, epoxy, concrete, acrylic![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58fde2eace2d6ead558c7622b86c891159053bd8dd1f5eefaaf6effca9d904cc/IMG_1680clean.jpg)
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Diamond Flex-Lok industrial mat with holes
2022Glazed ceramic1 x 96 x 24 in.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7ce2c8e5699ad1d2ab354f61e99a0f2a13dc5a4d381317df346319848406d2cb/IMG_0071-copy.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ca9521d5d8c87c099c9bffbbce067b41ab18d619904fdfb6d18e9cb67ce56bc5/DSC07511.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/53ee8d899c8a4726f29a9d94082c24cad4dd354a4070892369e48cdfe01cc7fa/Screenshot-2023-02-06-at-21.20.42.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3829ccbdc447f9680bac64a6e8c0080860ab2c1a603cd33cb542a9e079bf2965/Screenshot-2023-02-06-at-22.04.24.png)
Untitled Sign
Custom Made Reflective Aluminum Sign. steel.36 x 77 x 2 in.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e72e112b088a46242a682498b4320489cbc0e73b57a6b1959e8f5280b527740/IMG_0071.jpeg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f759f36d4b950b2644c5952777e0ec86152307e9475503416c10457d81d4695/IMG_1729.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/40f33917a606670153d49ad8284049bed162ee35004f096ddeb4bc8b362d82f1/IMG_1732.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/42d04a376cbd0c3d5e6b714aff99a09cadf92a3256cc5c30fd9fc26662f2f322/Hamiltonian_new.now_02.23-44.jpeg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/525d8bbf305397c326041942ca4e7187b4a7cdd9093e735aa47e316f936975a0/IMG_1719.jpg)
A Man At Point Zero
2021 The Anderson Gallery, VCU, Richmond VAMFA Graduation Show
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/31f1872c28410800b018c2fafd19b6677b732f16ccb7f5a182b06ab455e1f8b6/AMANATPOINTZERO.png)
The exhibition's title is an homage to the 1975 book Woman at Point Zero by Egyptian Feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi that I read as a child. Point Zero is a point of zero power. The book questions the ideas of choice and destiny for women under the patriarchal structures that are designed to subordinate them. The book is an iconic anti-patriarchal piece very well known to Arabs around the world. The sculptures combine sexuality and eroticism with elements of fragility and absurdity to a portray queer portrait of a man, whose identity and body are absent from the installation space, to speak about masculinity that is not experienced from a position of power.
Authenticself
ndf, Epoxy Primmer, Autopaint, Mirrored Plexiglass8ft x4inchx4inch
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8886aeb25cd587d08e1f31eb7d447a57fc503939e38c9e9d0212e0cc39092cbb/2Shalabi_AbedElmajid_2.jpg)
This floor sculpture is a mirror that is inspired by early 2000s pop culture and design. As a child I used to visit cheap hair salons together with my mother; They were designed with white NDF mirrors, epoxy-covered furniture, and many fake and shiny objects that created an illusion of luxury. This aesthetic of Western globalized culture contains both the promise and disappointment of capitalist life. The piece was placed on the floor to create a low viewpoint that mostly reflects the viewer's lower body, and create a provocative moment of irony. The text AUTHENTICSELF becomes a brand, a self-constructed product rather than a spiritual state of mind.
Car Seat
concrete, steel anchor30 1/2 × 19 × 26 in | 77.5 × 48.3 × 66 cm
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/40fa8480ab7b91234bc1097f5189e6f18fc346c4b221c39478f0c3a031bcc60a/Abedshalabi110.jpg)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c3fb38893170d707f3336327e56c56898331df687558e98fa98b2ed6d596c7d/Screen-Shot-2021-05-04-at-17.28.37.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/62871b21267e5aa3a84c29d2827af0f3184367e9db8770268d5628b883c5db2f/Screen-Shot-2021-05-03-at-17.46.40.png)
The car seat represents a passive point of power where the body is restricted and tied. the concrete carries the traumas of the artist’s laborers family and it turns the seat into a militant and masculine object, and challenges its innocence and asexuality
Last Arrow
custom made sign. steel. 36x36x2 each
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8ff817c2290e1d1b771caf325840735b1af8ceb436376a66ae85e96abc048b93/Screen-Shot-2021-05-20-at-20.32.06.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b02533d11e1e93127602e8dece0915a303c45e70a9fa2ee2c4acbc4e02576e17/Screen-Shot-2021-05-20-at-20.37.30.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/205663159b7c69902aef6c10cb0b560a4677986564016652b0de431bf8821e14/Screen-Shot-2021-05-20-at-20.33.10.png)
same, same
Pillows casted in Urethane Plastic, Fuel Hose and Nozzles.26inchX28inchx8feet
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11d4dba9f6c066fddec7c3421c5cc4c34e911ad992953d3bf3897f05efae2a09/12.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fb4065dd6f7c91f44646ad5fc991b4169c2cf3c7c386f4444f7b0e049acecd45/Screen-Shot-2021-05-04-at-18.19.02.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ae1e8a8d221b2313f3473b2c0651f7e88763d7aee485640695e198b2cd78426/Screen-Shot-2021-05-04-at-21.42.32.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/81268c4a1336a12db7c920c1df088804aa4bc5a16928feecfab7b66372c9e8b1/Screen-Shot-2021-05-22-at-20.19.24.png)
Police Vest. nr.1
Glazed Ceramics![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dd4a0bc2040ca2fa8edc52ab96fcd23b48f788d44feb0bbca75d599286ad7293/Screen-Shot-2021-05-04-at-18.45.21.png)
Police Vest.nr.2
Glazed Ceramics![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4cf360981aaf27a3820120c37a8aec17c3a31cffb1e72841c31a1477b7409362/Screen-Shot-2021-05-04-at-18.37.01.png)
Fountain
pillow casted in Urethane Plastic, Tire, Water Pump, Fiberglass, Rubber, Plastic sheet 31x31x17inch![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/00acbc5398b6c75d46ae431df93b926633db0548e63bd7dcd38b60f62350956f/Screen-Shot-2021-05-20-at-19.14.20.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9a348acc9e63ecc74755aecc22f3e458cd9fe485e7527e4c84ac9fdd6de6aacd/Screen-Shot-2021-05-20-at-19.14.31.png)
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3df37a58275dc5b508365782167a1f55cbeb16854e1588832a4025fecf687a8b/Screen-Shot-2021-05-20-at-19.14.45.png)
cheek video documentation to see the movment
https://vimeo.com/505071139/3c5dd6f1d7