The Current Situation

Yara El-Sherbini’s The Current Situation is wonderfully impressive in both scope and scale. Some eight metres by four metres of hand-wrought steel outline perfectly the borders of all the world’s countries, and take up a full wall of the NAE’s main gallery. But more than a sculpture, it’s actually a fully functioning, interactive steady-hand game, much like the kind you get ripped off at at Goose Fair, or the project you made in a DT lesson at school and then never took home. Here, participants use one of four special wands to navigate the wire around the edges of nations; every time contact is made with the metal a shrill buzzing klaxon sounds and a portentous red light comes on.

El-Sherbini’s point is the complexity of global borders, a matter which is highlighted when you have to physically trace them yourself - especially in areas which have also been politically complex such as the Balkan states. The artist also playfully asks viewers to question their own knowledge of geo-politics, something which really engages you and gets you thinking about the sometimes arbitrary and constantly changing nature of territories. “Why does Egypt have such straight borders?”  Maybe these lines had been drawn up by a committee over a fancy lunch, with no real consideration of the impact they might have had on the people either side of the border. Often the lines have shifted drastically over the course of a century.

Complementing The Current Situation is another piece by El-Sherbini titled The End of Series. This contains three separate but linked documents: Negri and Hardt’s philosophical work Empire, the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Middle East and Hergé’s now somewhat dubious Tintin in the Land of Black Gold. The artist has taken a hole punch to each, leaving the remains of the texts in neat little piles like confetti.

This all ties in very neatly with the accompanying exhibition in the Mezzanine Gallery, Year of Issue, by London-by-Lebanon artist Aya Haidar. Where El-Sherbini has taken texts and destroyed them, Haidar has been more reverential with the books in her exhibition. Eighteen of them lie open, spine-up, each one representing one of the eighteen Middle East and North African countries and each chosen because its year of publication matches an important date or flashpoint in a country’s history. The choices are meaningful, and a little cheeky too, making for a clever but also playful point. Egypt in 1922 marries up with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned. Iran1979’s obvious partner is The Neverending Story.

At the opening of these two shows there was an opportunity to sit in on a talk with El-Sherbini and Haidar themselves. Both the artists have very playful spirits, but El-Sherbini’s work in particular is shot through with wit. The Current Situation’s title is a musing on the nascent political environment but there’s also a neat little electricity pun thrown in there. And the buzz wire game is actually just one part of the exhibition. She’s also published a politically-charged word search in a local newspaper and is using NAE’s PA system to blast statements at gallery-goers which are designed to amusingly flip typical reductive judgements on race and culture (example: “I’m from the Midlands”, “Ohh, that’s so exotic!”). Next, she’s putting on a one-off pub-quiz-as-art-installation offsite at the Lion Inn, Basford. It’s all fun (kids were delighting in the wire game), but ultimately all El-Sherbini’s games and humour help open up a serious conversation and let audiences engage with important topics.

The Current Situation at New Art Exchange, Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham runs  until 7 September. The Pub Quiz takes place at the Lion Inn, Basford, Tuesday 20 May, 7.30pm, 50p per person entry.

New Art Exchange