Hanna Noor Mohammed
The light is life at What If the World
Let there be light, 2024
Artist Hanna Noor Mohammed has an exhibition that showed at What if the World Gallery. The works in the exhibition were executed with oil paint and depicted entoptic strict images. With a title inspired by famous poem “Do not go gently into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, the pieces express a measure of the existential and what is emotional.
The article will demonstrate how entoptic images are expressing encapsulated feelings around themes of death, life, creativity and self-expression as psychological facility to connect to what is perennial.
This is reflected in how some of the paintings are titled, given poetic and evocative titles that also capture certain emotions like the arbitrary form of the images that are depicted on the canvas. The piece titled “Rushdie the Puppet” is another reference to storytelling, novelist Rushdie is well known as confessed bibliophile, a notion that not only refers to writing, but it also speaks to words as images imbued with form. The work is executed with two tones, it starts from a cream shade to a Depp brown colour in the background with string blobs and pebble shaped images suggesting insouciant movement in the foreground.
We are not done yet, 2024
Another piece “We are Not Done Yet(Mandela Rhodes)” is also executed with entoptic images floating insouciantly in the foreground with a very light moss green colour in the background. This title speaks to a sense of social responsibility and political distance. The irony of being included in a diverse society and being excluded in a homogeneous one are latent in the title of this work. The artist is conscious of the ontological implications of the pressure for unity in a diverse community that is based on surface definitions and short term strategies. The sense of the moral and political function in this piece to articulate a bare and empty ethic about diversity.
Rage, Rage, Against the Dying of the Light, 2024
“Rage,Rage, Against The Dying of The Light” is a line from the poem by Dylan Thomas, it is also painted with two tones , the same cream but with a navy blue bottom half of the canvas in the background. The navy blue gives the piece a palpable depth and a discernible contrast with the images in the foreground. The sense of poignancy of the theme of loss articulate the quiet angst the artist titled this work with. Hanna Noor Mohammed works with sentiments that are interchangeable and immediate, this is symbolic in the operation of the two tone background and the use of abstraction as catharsis.
When visual artists execute their works with poetic images and narratives, history becomes peripheral, but it informs what is emotive and established as symbolically normal. This exhibition interrogates this notion in a measure that allows the audience to be stuck in the language of power and powerlessness just like the ethics that drive them. The exhibition relied on the entoptic abstract images to interrogate the operation of the symbolic as social and personal discourse.
This is reflected in the piece titled “Forever Trusting Who We Are(Dutte Chand)”, a portrait form executed piece, with the characteristic two tone black-gray background in this particular work. Creativity and self-awareness form part of the narratives questioning established ethics, Hannah Noor Mohammed, personalised hem in this exhibition and offered a different form and perspective on a cultural problematic that sees a clash between emotions and their symbolic guide posts in the culture.
The exhibition closes on the2 November 2024
Courtesy: the gallery and the artist