Exhibition review: Hamid Zénati, Claudia Martínez Garay and Julian Abraham at Nottingham Contemporary

Titled Two Steps at a Time, the first room showcasing works by Algerian-German artist Hamid Zénati is highly vibrant, colourful and playful. Zénati worked in multi-media throughout his career and the room shows a mixture of ceramic works, sculptures, textiles and photographs. His art exists on the boundary between design and fine art, with highly abstract rhythmic patterns that generally cover the entire surface area of his artworks. With forms sometimes recognisable as animal patterns, the patterns and colours in his work draw inspiration from folkish artworks from various areas of Algeria and north Africa and Sahrawi patterns. His work feels nostalgic for this cultural heritage and while there are some political aspects, his work is highly intuitive and therefore is difficult to pin down as being about specific ideas or political concepts. The rhythms and motifs in his work portray a certain musical synaesthesia and as you enter the next space of the exhibition you are met by drumming music in a relaxing samba beat.

Following through to the next space showing Zénati’s work, we have numerous pieces hanging from the ceiling, which swing gently in the breeze of the air conditioning in the room, almost as if swaying to the music. The artworks jostle for space and are placed in a shotgun spray around the room. This is a very interesting way of displaying artwork because most art galleries show a lot of deference for their art and have them carefully and clearly mounted in frames. As is often the case at Nottingham Contemporary, the display is more of an interactive experience you can walk through. The artist had a similar intuitive feel about how he made his art and we get to have a sense of being immersed, while walking through the colours and sounds of his world.

Moving into the next exhibition room, we can see the work of Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay. The room is filled with a giant pile of (what looks like) earth with sculptures sticking out of the top soil and two large pencil drawings of a cat and a fish protruding out of the top of the pile. The work is entitled; WAKCHAKUNA / We Who Share Everything and Nothing. The pile of earth appears to be a pile of ‘archaeological spoils’; in other words, artefacts discovered in an archaeological dig in a huge pile. The artist references pre-Columbian aesthetics and her Andean heritage, while the sculptures in the mound are replicas of real artefacts from the British Museum dating to this period of history. The artefacts would have certainly carried religious or spiritual value in their original context and that makes the viewer wonder whether the mound could be viewed as a kind of spirit mountain, or, more likely, a spoil heap of history. This makes the viewer question how we view history and how we treat cultural heritage. Garay invites the viewer to draw their own conclusions about the work and to think about how we treat lost world cultural heritage. In this sense the earth mound might be described as a postmodern spoil heap of history or as ‘art in situ synthesised’.

Finally, the third large exhibition space in the gallery contains works by multidisciplinary artist, musician and social researcher Julian Abraham. Entitled; 'Togar': REꓘONCILIATION, this is a specially enjoyable part of the exhibition, the room is filled with musical instruments that the public are invited to play with a piano, some guitars, an accordion, a microphone and numerous strange musical devices. The walls of the gallery space are filled with signs inviting the public to ‘co-experiment, co-explore, co-imagine, co-produce’. The room is a collective musical instrument for the public to make spur of the moment music. Sometimes this results in a cacophony, which I can personally attest to, but the exhibition is certainly a very fun and interesting idea. I think the artist succeeds in their goal of directly engaging with local communities of young people in the city by getting them to participate in the artist's exploratory sonic world. Despite every room being very different from each other, the exhibition does have a coherency because each artist makes us reflect on heritage and community.

Hamid Zénati: Two Steps at a Time, Claudia Martínez Garay: WAKCHAKUNA / We Who Share Everything and Nothing and Julian Abraham 'Togar': REꓘONCILIATION are showing at Nottingham Contemporary until 8 September.