Diana Al-Hadid: Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things

“It’s all line and plane, just drip or pool. That’s the organizing principle of how I build form.” —Diana Al-Hadid

In Mother Splits the Moon (2023), the artist’s first suspended sculpture, the phantasmic outline of a reclining female figure manifests from a linear composition bathed in hues of bronze and oxidized blue. Reaching the entire height of the gallery ceiling, her torso arises from a sedimentary platform that appears to trace layers of glacial material, as if the hovering base of the sculpture was carved from a cross section of frozen ground. The characteristic pose of this enmeshed body finds a formal echo in the two major works installed upon the roof of the Kasmin Sculpture Garden above, In Mortal Repose (2011), the artist’s first figurative bronze, and Double Standard (2022), which presents an inversion—the stacked figures are adjoined at the neck to create a nearly symmetrical composition of headless bodies, the top dissolving into the other similar to how sand passes through an hourglass.

This selective featureless approach to representation is carried in Al-Hadid’s treatment of recurring portrayals of the Ancient Greek mythological figures Danae and Medusa, women that each hold a critical space of reverence and power in the artist’s recent work. Across two-dimensional reliefs such as The Bronze Chamber of Danae (2023) or Blue Medusa (2023) and related works on paper, their implied presence is traced through the depiction of subjects that surround them. In the case of Danae, Al-Hadid’s meticulous compositions of metallic marks reference the transformation of Zeus into golden coins that shower upon her, whereas Medusa is depicted in a suite of wall-mounted reliefs and works on paper via the serpents that encircle her. While neither is given explicit form, the non-human elements that accompany both women through centuries of historical European painting and sculpture, to signify either the signals or consequences of rape, are abstracted in Al-Hadid’s mesmerizing compositions.

Unfastened from linear time, Al-Hadid’s engagement with her source material provokes an experience of ‘anemoia,’ a term invented by writer John Koenig to define a feeling of nostalgia for a past you have never known. Alongside ancient mythology, several of Al-Hadid’s works reference the compositions of 16th-century Falnama, or book of omens. Quoting the compositions of these divine manuscripts, often used for the purposes of ritualistic fortune-telling, the artist’s works on paper made at Dieu Donné—the leading nonprofit cultural institution dedicated to the use of hand papermaking processes in contemporary art founded in 1976—emulate the same frontal experience of Persian Miniatures. Likewise, Al-Hadid’s opalescent wall relief The Seven Sleepers and the Dog (2023) cites Islamic depictions that chronicle the story of Christian men who escaped persecution by miraculously sleeping in a cave for 309 years—ideas and motifs that can be traced back to the artist’s Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2021.

In what can be seen as a key to the exhibition, Warda (2023) exists as a bronze of a rootbound jasmine plant. Cast from remnants of the artist’s work The Time Being, commissioned as part of the 2022 FRONT Triennial in Cleveland, the entangled roots can be read as a kind of allegory of how Lakoff’s categories falter when faced with the irregularities between cultures and minds. The title of the work shares its name with the singer Warda Al-Jazairia, the renowned diva of Arab song whose music partly inspired the piece, as well as the Arabic word related to flower. Returning to Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, the author proposes that countries, our conception of nations, share a category with the male gender. “I was listening to a love song of Warda’s, written to a man, and I could not help but hear the longing in her voice addressing a native country,” says Al-Hadid. 

Jasmine is the national flower of Syria, but here it is also an autobiographical emblem of the artist’s practice. Making visible what is often underfoot, the work stands as a relic of the immigrant experience—of the need to grow in a new territory, of the unconscious binds that surround us, of coming home.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Al-Hadid’s major site-specific project for the upcoming NGV Triennial at The National Gallery of Art, Australia, which opens on December 3.