Programming for "Getting Over the Color Green"

Getting Over the Color Green, a group exhibition curated by Athoub AlBusaily and Gaith Abdulla, is the outcome of Engage101’s second Peer Review Program. Featuring the works of Adele Bea Cipste, Ana Escobar Saavedra, Fatma Al Ali, Hala El Abora, Sara Farha, Sarra Elomrani, and the artist collective of Ruba Al-Sweel, Rojda Yavuz & Shamiran Istifan.

When starting this process of co-developing the public programming, Lubnah Ansari and I initially began with some reflective activities. I noticed meditation and the ‘nature’ have nearly become synonyms within societal rhetoric on practices of ‘living life to its fullest,’ as though a mandate exists dictating the value of every person’s experience. With it, humans become compulsive creatures that validate obsessions with ‘the self’ by creating hierarchies. In these hierarchies, we find one that defines spaces across the Earth, attaching land to these polisocial-market-defined values. And we then reflect on these socially mandated hierarchies; reflect and argue; and reflect again and change; reflect and reflect and reflect. Ultimately, revisions of our own interpretations, reactions, and perspective on the show’s philosophies guided this program. We consider the visitor a fully-actualized and active participant in the dialogue. Therefore, in an attempt to welcome the visitor to this obsessive practice of reflection, many of our programs prioritize asking sets of questions, and ideally collecting the visitor’s response, fueling this cyclical process of validating one’s obsession with ‘the self’ in a context such as the Earth.


Curatorial Statement:
The color green informs our agendas of a perfect landscape, aesthetics, taste, dreams, spiritual connotations of reward, visions of gardens, and divinely tended landscapes. Getting Over the Color Green meant many things during the process of making this exhibition. The underlying thread was aiming for a better awareness of the environment, and understanding it not as a place but a concept, in an attempt to decolonize the intrenched structures of thought associated with it. To dismantle ideas linked to arid landscapes, colonial associations of the desert environment, and why we place green atop our hierarchical view of nature.

The artworks in this exhibition discuss themes of money madness, water’s relationship to civilization, senseless urban sprawl, violent legacies of colonial bureaucracies, obsession with ownership and possession, and our judgment of the value of objects and their transaction to the status of artifacts.