Exhibition Text
An Almanac of Return
In response to سعد الفقيه, The Land Suddenly Pierces by Nahla Tabbaa
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The artist is a rupture and a landscape at once.
In Bilad Al Sham, winter is not a uniform period of cold. It is a gradual, four-stage interaction between the sky and soil known as the Saads. This folklore divides the fifty days of Khamasiniyah into a cold, cyclical narrative of isolation, survival, and emergence.
The Saads begin with the frost of Saad al-Dhabih, then move into the heavy rain of Saad Bala, when the earth absorbs moisture. Next comes the gradual warming of Saad al-Saud. The cycle finishes with Saad al-Khabaya, as the spring equinox begins.
Saad al-Khabaya is when the land begins to pierce itself. Rupturing cracks to welcome light, rain, and air; to bring out the snakes and make the young girls twirl. The bloom of spring comes after the brutal of winter; a necessary violence for a beautiful outcome.
In this new body of work, Nahla Tabbaa labors a tedious process of subjecting herself and her practice to similar thresholds of the Saads. Here, the artist’s selfless surrender coalesces an imprint of survival; a carried tenderness that can only come from a beastly process; a fragile amalgamation of unwavering persistence.
Ten kilometers West of Amman, Mahes is in full bloom: the soil, in every color, and the sky, in every blue. “I grew up here,” Tabbaa says.
Sublime as it is, this very landscape was a site of violence. An occurrence that repositioned nature into a quiet witness; its beauty, a futile evidence. This forced their family to relocate to the city, eventually leading Tabbaa to study and live abroad. This cut her life in two timelines, before and after.
This, she names, “a rupture.”
After the rupture, she returns, committing to call Jordan “home indefinitely.”
It is believed that nature, time, and space are healers. If distance fugues the mind, then time heals the body.
Tabbaa’s homecoming, whether or not necessary, is imminent.
“Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve had many profound encounters with nature,” she says. “There was a tree at the SEAF studios which danced in front of my window, as if swaying me for months. I understood her message; she led me back to Jordan.” During her residency in Bali, another uncanny moment brought back a memory of the garden she grew up in; she reflects, “it felt as though the garden itself was speaking, asking why I had left and telling me it was safe to return. As I cried, the land kept insisting that my tears and overwhelming sadness were a kind of nourishment.”
Tabbaa’s return is an Odyssey. A pilgrimage where she retraces steps within familiar territories. Only this time, the land is no longer quiet, unmoving; it cracked open to an old friend. The land, as it pierces itself, blooms a myriad of ethereal narratives with unforgettable characters; an offering she accepts and integrates into sculptures, paintings, and tapestries.
Initially, Tabbaa sought Bahmout, a Canaanite mythological fish believed to be a vast foundation carrying the world on her back. In her vastness, the earth is but a mustard seed, able to fit into her nostril. The generous rainfall of 2026 puddled the limestones; perhaps, in these small bodies of water, is a myth-come-true. And yet, the Bahmout stays elusive. Instead, she offers Tabbaa something equally mystic, but still of this world: a shepherd leading a herd.
Strangely, this herd was a mix of animals, introducing a new understanding of siblingry between different species. Tabbaa reflects, “weird and wonderful relationships exist in the more-than-human world. In a tradition called the Miryaa, lambs are nursed by donkeys. These donkey-sheep, with their bells and shaggy coats, then lead flocks of sheep. In becoming eunuchs, they sacrifice their eroticism. The lambs inherit the stillness and poise of their mother donkey. I also encountered a shepherd dog nursing a donkey, which behaves just like his mother and siblings.”
Later, she notes, “it made me think about human traditions, too. In many cultures, when a woman breastfeeds another child, those children cannot marry. They become milk siblings. At first, that idea seemed strange to me. But when you see these animal systems, where animals adopt each other and nurture across species, it begins to make sense. It shows how love, care, and motherhood can move across boundaries.”
There is comfort in the strangeness we confront when we gaze longer; the land, bearing knowledge a man could not amass, leads us to a paradigm shift.
Beyond stories, she foraged the land for tools and materials; her paintings dissolved and bubbled through water from a spring rumored to produce the world’s highest rate of twins; her sculptures, made with wild Jordanian clay, shaped in the land of its material origin; her bread woven with Qurrays, a plant that triggers the body’s histamines to build strength, served alongside Khubeizeh, which grows beside it to absorb the sting.
Tabbaa worked throughout the Saads. She endured the winter in forests and mountains, companioned by Qatlab, a wild strawberry tree; Feijun-fringed rue; Muscari flowers; botanists; forest rangers; and the sacred Blessing Shrines, which prophesied miracles for the landscape.
The land, the rupture, the violence, the past, had de-mapped once-familiar groves into dark, inaccessible voids. However, in artistic reclamation, Tabbaa presents a deliberate vulnerability. An almanac that shows a geography in which a site marker is removed and replaced with a new one. A new map created by an artist who is no longer a fugitive of calamity.
Is this pursuit necessary? Must we always reclaim violence? What is our insistence on this reclamation? In the insistence of tenderness, do we sanitize the gravity we seek to address?
A binary of surrender and submission exists in nature. Prey yields to the predator, the tree surrenders to the wind, man decays to dust. “But I wouldn’t call it surrender,” Tabbaa resists. Perhaps here, the artist and the land bypass both. A dialogue of resilience is fostered, resulting in works that embody ruptures, thresholds of land, of body.
When the land pierces again, the rupture, as it cracks open, will be tender. ✶