لعب 遊び PLAY

For “East-East: UAE meets Japan Vol.5, Atami Blues”, Shaikha Al Ketbi is presenting a video installation that explores the idea of play, luck, and reverberations of time and space. 

Al Ketbi is an Emirati artist based in Tokyo, where she recently started her MFA at Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School of Global Arts Practice (GAP). Her practice blends performance, painting, photography, and video, and explores the performativity of myths in the United Arab Emirates. Depictions of characters existing between the realms of  jinns, or spirits in Arabic, and humans, are often present in her work, with a recurring female figure tapping into the unknown and invisible. 

During her OPEN ACAO RESIDENCY in Atami, she explored ties linking to palaces and hotels in her native emirate of Abu Dhabi, and HOTEL ACAO ANNEX. Atami resort’s 1970s and 1980s interiors reminded her of the Armed Forces Officers Club Hotel and Emirates Palace, two massive hotel structures built in the 2000s in Abu Dhabi, as well as majlises sitting areas in Emirati households usually adorned with chandeliers and rococo furniture. 

The idea of “wormhole” emerged. Defined as a speculative structure linking disparate points in spacetime (points in three-dimension space with specific time coordinates), a wormhole is based on Einstein’s field equations and can be visualized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points. The wormhole is a bridge between two places at two different times. We are here in the presence of an in-between portal: Al Ketbi bridges 1980s Atami with 2000s Abu Dhabi, in a new wormhole installation created in 2022. 

Entitled لعب 遊び PLAY, this portal depicts a character wandering in a frozen moment of time, trying to pass time by the innocent act of play. She plays hide and seek alone, in the vast expanse of HOTEL ACAO ANNEX. She manufactures her own luck, shuffling cards to get a Royal Flush, moving the dice to match numbers, and stopping Doctor Yellow Shinkansen toy trains in th