LINDA EMILY AL-GHUSSEIN
1977 | Stockholm, Sweden | sculpture
Bye Bye Friends
I have been working as an artist for more than ten years now, and I feel it is time to make an artistic statement, not just so that I can personally understand what I am doing, but also so that other people will recognize the importance of free art for society.
Today, with capitalism running the economy, art is becoming increasingly market-driven, which means that art is becoming increasingly dependent on being saleable. A handful of artists who do not make productive art do get a place in society, but frighteningly many interesting artists vanish into oblivion.
I want to demonstrate the importance of the fact that people – and by that I mean citizens – need various kinds of art in order to discover their own taste and to experience their own senses. Artforms such as film, photography, literature, theatre, circus, performance, and so on are not something that can be governed by money, but have to be respected for their own inherent nature.
In my art it is the immediate experience that is important, the experience of the encounter with the material, the experience of our different senses with the art. When constructing installations I create fictive worlds that spectators can enter into and experience the art with their whole body. I hope this experience will prompt a feeling, a thought, an idea, a conversation…
Bye Bye Friends started with the idea of a flock of birds that creates a formation. We see them as a group in motion, but not as individuals with their own wills, feelings and desires. From a distance they all look alike, but if we give them a little time, we see their individuality.In Bye Bye Friends each bird is cast in plaster from the same basic shape, but I use textiles, silicone and clay to make each bird a separate individual. Just like birds, we humans are all different. Even if we create bonds between us, our feelings, wills and desires are individual, not least in our experience of art.
Art has to be free from market forces and air forces. The idea of birds without wings that have to be helped to fly is a visual image that I have been wanting to realize for a long time. The title is a farewell, but also a beginning of something new and unknown. Through encounters and conversations with the visitors who see my art, I realize the work in shared interpretations. As an artist, I do not have the answer or the whole truth, but rather this is something living and changing.