Juxtapoz Magazine - COBRA: Shadi Al-Atallah @ Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Deptford, London

"Elizabeth Xi Bauer is pleased to present COBRA, an exhibition of new works by Shadi Al-Atallah, a London-based Saudi artist known for emotionally charged figurative paintings that inhabit liminal spaces between intimacy and conflict. While themes of identity, queerness, and spirituality remain central to his practice, COBRA marks a striking transformation-shifting from the painterly to the immersive, from the singular image to a multi-sensory world of video, sound, object, and light."

"At the centre of COBRA are three large-scale video projections cast onto suspended curtains of fabric that curve and ripple through the gallery like the body of a serpent. These moving images draw from Al-Atallah's research into archival footage of queer men and transfeminine people in Saudi Arabia dancing together-intimate, spontaneous gestures of joy, affection, and defiance. The footage, sourced from digital archives, speaks to lost histories and fragile forms of visibility."

"In COBRA, these fragments of digital memory are heavily reworked and abstracted-transformed into a sensuous chiaroscuro of light and shadow that recalls the expressive brushwork of his paintings. "Although the show is honouring and reinterpreting, haunting is a very important element as well," the artist explains. "I wanted it to feel like stepping into a portal where time is warped." The degraded quality of the video and sound underscores this temporal dislocation, evoking what the artist calls a "resurrection o"

COBRA shifts Al-Atallah's practice from painterly figurative work to an immersive, multi-sensory environment of video, sound, object, and light. Figures appear genderless, fragmented, and in transformation, resisting binary readings while drawing on religious mythology, literature, science, and gender theory. Three large-scale video projections are cast onto suspended, serpentine curtains of fabric that curve and ripple through the gallery like a serpent's body. Archival digital footage of queer men and transfeminine people in Saudi Arabia is reworked and abstracted into degraded, chiaroscuro moving images and sound, producing a warped sense of time and fragile visibility.

Read at Juxtapoz