Passionate Nomad

In his series Passionate Nomad, Al Banna channels the ethereal and sentimental energetic forces of the desert and its inhabitants, sourcing from his two primary materials: paper and textile. He animates his paper with compositions in multi-hued inks. As they reach a state of completion, he proceeds to shred his paper into scraps at random, then reassembles them into his collages. In some cases, the delicate fragments interlock with strands of the lurid, multicoloured fabrics from the jalabiya, a traditional dress worn by women in the Gulf. Shaped like an amorphous constellation of human cells, he explains that each cut of paper or strand of fabric carries the codes of emotion, like human cells containing the body’s hereditary material. Every scrap is a unique form, a signature of molecules and matter reorganised into new order. Here, he responds to the abstractness of the wide spectrum of human emotion, transfiguring it into visual form.