Hybrid Futures: ‘The Poetics of Water’ at Castlefield Gallery

Charu Vallabhbhai

Writer and curator Charu Vallabhbhai reviews Hybrid Futures: ‘The Poetics of Water’ on show at Castlefield Gallery until 24 September 2023, an exhibition of new works by Jessica El Mal and Parham Ghalamdar. Here, visitors can engage directly with different perspectives and lived experience of the climate crisis, focusing in particular on contrasting attitudes towards rainfall, particularly between Manchester (where regular rainfall is a common source of complaint) and Morocco and Iran (where droughts and water shortages are an increasingly serious problem). Castlefield Gallery is working in partnership with Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool, Touchstones Rochdale, University of Salford Art Collection and Shezad Dawood Studio on Hybrid Futures, a pilot project that aims to act on climate change by introducing sustainability in commissioning, exhibiting and collecting art for their region. the Fourdrinier is proud to play a role in publishing newly commissioned writing about this project.

Hybrid Futures: ‘The Poetics of Water’ at Castlefield Gallery is an exhibition that transposes the viewer from Manchester to the Middle East and North Africa. Paintings and ceramics by Parham Ghalamdar generate a sense of the desert in peril while Jessica El Mal’s sumptuous multimedia collaborations establish a trail towards the essence of rain. These new bodies of work comment on both absence and presence of water, while addressing themes related to place, traces of the past, nature and our human relationship with the natural environment.

For centuries people have shaped landscapes across the globe, cultivating what had been the natural habitats of different species and making their mark on locations previously uninhabited by humans. The scale of intervention has never been as disruptive nor as damaging as that made since the beginnings of industrialisation. When extreme weather causes wildfires in countries of the so-called developed world, our news channels respond by reporting the devasting loss and damage. We hear much less in the media about the effects of the climate emergency on parts of North Africa and the Middle East, relegated in the Western imagination as dusty deserts and distant locations of contemporary conflict. 

The artists Jessica El Mal and Parham Ghalamdar, whose new commissions are presented in ‘The Poetics of Water’, have made work about Morocco and Iran respectively, two countries whose land masses both coincidentally lie 32 degrees north of the equator. They are nations that, in the twentieth century, were wrestled over by the ambitions of colonising European states: England and Russia in Persia (as Iran was then known before wider use of its indigenous name) and France together with Spain in Morocco.

British Petroleum (BP) traded once as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company with Britain controlling much of Persia’s oil revenue. However, the histories of each country explored in these bodies of work are more recent, commenting on the decisions that have been made over the past fifty years, since capitalism has overtaken colonialism. Under its influence, the governing bodies are neither less neglectful in their responsibilities towards achieving equality for all their nation’s citizens, nor in protecting their precious natural environment.

The Water We Seek (2023), shown in the upper galleries, is an animation made by Jessica El Mal in collaboration with artist duo Kimiā Collective, digital artist and animator Zineb Sekkat a.k.a. LINEZ and musician-producer Patryk Krol. The animation pieces together, in linear form, numerous individual cyanotypes. These works were made by exposing paper coated in cyanotype solution to daylight while held under the fluid motion of a water source in the High Atlas Mountains. The images captured through this process by El Mal with Kimiā Collective appear uncannily organic, many of them bearing symmetrical shapes that could be considered to resemble parts of the human body.

Created by LINEZ, the animation of The Water We Seek replicates the flow of a river downstream. It digitally responds to Krol’s soundtrack, itself a collage, merging with his music the words of a local tourist guide, recorded conversations at the Moss Observatory in the High Atlas Mountains and poetry written by El Mal, performed in both English and Arabic by Nussaiba Roussi. The animation navigates the soundscape’s course like water negotiating terrain. Towards the end there is visual turbulence as the forms created in cyanotype begin to distort and break up, the current of the water disrupted – perhaps by intervention.

Earlier in the soundtrack, words from the tour guide, Mbarek Benghazi, describe his home in the Dra Valley as it is now. M’hamid El Ghizlane was once a lush oasis offering a resting and meeting point for travelling nomads and caravans, but it now only supports tourism as the region’s agricultural past is no longer sustainable. Benghazi’s words offer a clue to the vanishing of this final oasis on the edge of the Sahara. He refers to the building of the dam that made ‘the water stop … year by year,’ its effect drying out a land that had also received inadequate rainfall.

Studies show that in the past century the Sahara has expanded in size by 10%. The early 1970s saw rapid change in the Dra Valley with less rainfall in North Africa and unusual heatwaves. The rain has also become irregular, which disturbs agricultural cycles and leads to drought, but this has been exacerbated by poor water management. In 1972 the El-Mansour Eddahbi dam was created to manage freshwater resources and improve irrigation. However, the benefits are only felt much further upstream as the reservoir is located closer to the Dra’s water source in the Atlas Mountains and supplies the nearby city of Ouarzazate.

When the dam was constructed, water was discharged from it, down the river valley, six times a year; but water releases began to diminish to three times, and more recently only twice annually. As the river reaches M’hamid El Ghizlane, most of the water is already used up and what remains has been polluted. Benghazi imagines a future when the sands spread north to the Atlas and ‘to the big city and maybe Europe.’ Expressing a sense of grave loss, he repeats the words ‘dry, very dry’ and describes the ‘very long roots’ of the date palm trees stretching deep into the ground, probing for water. Parham Ghalamdar’s paintings depict a similar process in his other-worldly landscapes.

Deserts display magnificent hues when lit by the rising and setting sun, but the colours of Ghalamdar’s new body of works on canvas are at once acidic and saccharine sweet. Rather than the desert regions of Iran, which are in total 23% of the country’s land, these scenes could be the surfaces of uninhabitable worlds – Jupiter, Venus or Mars. The words of Moroccan tour-guide Benghazi resonate in these surreal bisections that take a slice from the sky deep down into the ground. They reveal the activity, beneath the surface, of plant life that struggles when exposed to the air, their roots penetrating through layers, perhaps filters, to reach better quality nutrient-rich soil and uncontaminated water.

Accompanying the artworks is a text, The Workers are Suffering by an anonymous Iranian journalist, writer, artist and activist. In its preface, written by Ghalamdar, details are redacted to protect the identity of this report’s author who was imprisoned in November 2022 by Iranian authorities under the charge of ‘propaganda against the system’. In ‘The Poetics of Water’, Ghalamdar shares the author’s account of the environmental cost and human anguish witnessed in Asalouyeh, an industrial city on the shore of the Persian Gulf in Iran. What the report describes offers tragically real-life circumstances through which Ghalamdar’s painted scenes could be interpreted.

Asalouyeh is the closest land point to the largest natural gas field in the world and is the site for the land-based facilities of petrochemical, oil and gas refineries of the Pars Special Energy Economic Zone (PSEEZ). The report details the environmental impact of polluting gases and heavy metal particles emitted from PSEEZ, including its effect on marine habitats, severe damage to the health of Asalouyeh’s inhabitants and the horrendous conditions imposed on workers at PSEEZ. The first of Ghalamdar’s untitled paintings, displayed in the upper galleries at Castlefield, depicts rain falling onto a cracked surface through which two barely budding plants have emerged. Are they exposed, in this eery setting, to the corrosive acid rain that results from sulphur and nitrogen oxides reacting to moisture in the atmosphere of Asalouyeh and its neighbouring cities?

Descending into the lower galleries, new ceramic works by Ghalamdar can be seen from the street, along with more of his landscapes, almost all in vertical format. The paintings appear window-like or as reflections onto tall mirrors. The trail of ceramics down to the lower spaces could comprise objects abandoned in Ghalamdar’s desolate settings. Some appear to be vessels, dried out from the absence of water that has been replaced by a cocktail of toxic petrochemical waste. Ghalamdar contemplates a recurring theme in Persian mythology of ‘the struggle to prevent the separation of soil and water and the repression of growth and knowledge that this causes.’ The surfaces of these vases and jars are beaded with blue and black droplets, perhaps representing water and soil, repelling each other. The black is sticky, as if soil has been corrupted by crude oil. Other items, covered in this inky gel, are reminiscent of the debris that accompanies trapped seabirds, harmed by oil spillages.

In the double height space of the lower galleries, the view up to Ghalamdar’s paintings, presented at street level, places the viewer beneath the webs of plant roots; but this is no transportation to hell. The white gallery walls evoke the feeling of a clinical observation chamber and a subterranean position of safety. The adjacent space, presenting more of El Mal’s collaborations, is cavern-like, emitting a blue glow that signals water’s presence in these three bodies of work. On the walls of the space are cyanotypes from the ‘Spring Rain Collection’ created by exposing the coated paper to rainfall, recording patterns of individual droplets at they hit a surface, while the title of each cyanotype records the date it was made. They embody the identity of gentle rain, proof of its occurrence in Morocco on dates in March and December 2022.

An Ocean in Every Drop (2023) takes the images created by the date stamp cyanotypes, using them to screen print in different shades of blue onto sheets of fabric. Suspended from the gallery ceiling, they create a waterfall effect from the droplets, rendered timeless and almost infinite in this formation. The scale of the screen-printed fabric required the contribution of graphic artist Soufiane Ourich who led a team to construct and operate the silk screen frames. The visual works are accompanied by a composition in sound arranged during the making of the screen prints, the rhythmic process of which influenced the production and editing of Taghounja (2023). This audio work builds up to fill the lower galleries of Castlefield with joyous sound – a celebration of desert rain made by El Mal together with musician Saad Elbaraka and oud player Mohktar Hsina who manipulates the strings of this instrument to create the melody. The tune of Taghounja offers a lighter tone in which to re-encounter Ghalamdar’s paintings before returning to the upper galleries at Castlefield.

Ghalamdar signals a warning in these new works while El Mal offers an alternative way. In her practice of working collectively, El Mal recognises that all her work is produced within an interdependent community. This is a reflection of the great need for cooperative will and action, globally. The exhibition acknowledges that the voracious appetite for wealth that drives damaging industries should be abandoned, and that governments, rather than supporting, should jointly apply sanctions to the giant corporations that generate enormous funds for their shareholders at catastrophic environmental cost. This short-sightedness, recognised in Hybrid Futures: ‘The Poetics of Water’, remains astonishing.

This review is supported by Hybrid Futures and Castlefield Gallery