Artists: Josef Albers, Ricardo Alcaide, Salwa Aleryani, Afruz Amighi, Rasheed Araeen, Dana Awartani, Marlon de Azambuja, Rana Begum, James Clar, Graham Day, Ayman Yossri Daydban, Richard Deacon, Adrian Esparza, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mounir Fatmi, Basmah Felemban, Babak Golkar, Hazem Harb, Nargess Hashimi, Sahand Hesmayan, Saba Innab, Nadia Khawaja, Sol LeWitt, Hazem Mahdy, Sama Mara & Lee Westwood, Moataz Nasr, Timo Nasseri, Mujahidin Nurrahman, Seckin Pirim, Younes Rahmoun, Dania Al Saleh, Nasser Al Salem, Sara Salman, Gulay Semercioglu, Seher Shah, Ayesha Sultana, Gebran Tarazi, Michael John Whelan, and Ralf Ziervogel.

The Language of Human  Consciousness
July 11- October 10, 2014
Athr Gallery
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

For thousands of years, the question of whether the basics of geometry came naturally to all humans or if they had to be taught has been explored. According to Plato’s writings, Socrates attempted to determine how well an uneducated slave in a Greek household understood geometry, and eventually concluded that the slave’s soul “must have always possessed this knowledge.”

In the midst of startling havoc; humans by this very instinct seek to find order in this chaos, to reason with it; translating it to a language that is perhaps visual and universal is a common field of exploration for scientists and artists alike.

Athr Gallery will deliver a groundbreaking exhibition titled The Language of Human Consciousness in July and will include work by over 39 artists from around the world. Most of these artists will be exhibiting work for the first time in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East at large. To inaugurate the opening on July 10, Director of Tate Modern, Chris Dercon will moderate a discussion with pioneering artists in the field whom are Rasheed Araeen, Dana Awartani, Richard Deacon and Founder of Agial Gallery Saleh Barakat, who will be representing the late Gebran Tarazi.

Work by pioneering artists such as Josef Albers, Rasheed Araeen, Richard Deacon, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Sol Lewitt and Gebran Tarazi will be exhibited: Rasheed Araeen—a Pakistani national and London-based conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, writer, curator and founder of the The Third Text—will also be participating in the exhibition with his work, Zero to Infinity—of which a variation of the work was exhibited and acquired by the TATE Modern. The installation consists of 36 multi-colored cubes. The discussion will end with Rasheed inviting guests to move the units around the gallery, disrupting the uniform display to leave the cubes in a more complex and spontaneous arrangement.

The Language of Human Consciousness takes geometry as a starting point, accepting its heritage as a symbol of purity, intelligence and perfection and bringing it towards a more contemporary interpretation as a language for exploring the atypical, the imperfect and the alternative. Works are brought together that seek to dissect segments of times, contexts and places and open them up to universal interpretation. The works, in the potency of the contradiction between their infinite possibilities as geometric compositions and the range of their references—social, political, art historical or other—are reduced to a neutral ground: to a human and conceivable form.

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