The aquariums rev and babble, motors circulating water despite their empty state. Their black steel frames vibrate. Their glass panes are coated with a salty residue from the receding waterline but also, perhaps, from what once lived within.Two round, vertical containers are set beside the aquariums. Filled with a murky liquid, they are tall and wide enough to hold a person. Again, they are empty, save for something on the floor that looks like moss or seaweed. The strands and tufts aren’t green though.“Inside the jars are shavings of my skin,” Nour Elbery says of her installation. “There’s a formalin inside, a preservation solution.”Elbery is one of the six fine arts graduates from NYUAD presenting works at the Rizq Art Initiative. The show, Mutable Devotions, runs until August 31. It comprises six smaller exhibitions, each of which is dedicated to an artist.Elbery’s use of skin shavings is not meant as a shock element – not completely anyway. It draws a point of trying to contain what should not be contained. “Each work is less a vessel for something than a vessel for the memory of holding something,” she writes in her artist statement.Set Dressing for an Afterimage was inspired by the Aquarium Grotto Garden in Zamalek, Cairo. The man-made cave was initially built in 1871 as a bit of a vanity project for Khedive Ismail. The Ottoman viceroy, infamous for his extravagance, inte...
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