The Universe

The Universe is a monumental wall-mounted collage created for the 25th Emirates Fine Art Society Annual Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Arabic Art. From floor-to-ceiling, the collage when atomized, consists of printed black ink on white paper, presenting what resembles celestial bodies orbiting in space. With no former planning and in total kinetic motion generated by the spur of the moment, the artist arbitrarily ripped and glued the paper directly onto the wall in swirling masses, creating constellations distributed in a disk, seemingly rotating in massive galactic space. In this improvisational act, he creates the puzzle and attempts to complete it. The wall, immersive in sense, swallows the viewer into infinite deep space where movement is a relentless optical illusion. The collage was later taken apart and the scraps of paper have been recycled into other works of his.

Mohamed Mahdi Hemida