GEMAAL OP ZUID
Expositieserie
Spiritual Disobedience #2
by:Yusser al Obaidi
Yusser al Obaidi is a decolonial feminist researcher, writer and graphic designer who seeks to acknowledge and enable the radical potential of intimate relational spaces. She works with themes such as diasporic identity, oral histories, Sufi epistemology, modernity/coloniality, and the connection between micro and macro personal/political narratives. Her practice revolves around intimate forms of publishing and the mobilization of alternative knowledge circulation patterns for words that sit close to the skin. Her central concern: “How can we affirm other ways of being/knowing?”
Spiritual Disobedience: O Companion of Time
Having entered Parallel Portals of Crossing, we now call: O Companion of Time, guide us to navigate the remnants of times plural.
Sahib al-Zamaan, the Companion of Time, appears in Shia cosmology as one who remains present while hidden. His absence is not disappearance. The hidden Imam continues to accompany the world, like a sun behind clouds. His reappearance belongs to a time still to come, a time of divine justice.
In the wake of ongoing loss, the artists in this exhibition series relay our gaze to what remains: remnants of bodies, histories, traditions, landscapes, and worlds which persist, carrying the possibility of just futures yet to come.
We are living among the remnants of multiple times. Dom dom, tak dom, tak. The Masmoudy rhythm brings us to the edges of epochs, to the edges of colonial time. What is severed does not disappear. It remains as a trace, carrying memory with it.
What the marshes keep unfolds at the end of the world, where Hufaidh, an island in the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq, is said to appear and disappear. Iraqi and Mesopotamian mythology, Shia commemoration and mourning traditions determine what appears, what vanishes and what is reactivated.
In the Hawizeh marsh, where land and water have long been in continuous negotiation, oil enters the equation, contaminating the water and intensifying the vanishing landscape. Between Water and Oil brings us to testimonies of Ahwari life in the marshes, where the remains of past wars and present oil extraction compete with the future of the water.
What appears as absence may also be a hidden presence. What does it mean to live with what remains unseen? Can the traces of other times help us navigate the one we inhabit?
Ya sahib al-zamaan is an invocation to the Companion of Time. Can the hidden guide the present? O Companion of Time, guide us. Hasten your reappearance. We are among the remnants of the times.
Featuring works by Mohamed Abdelkarim, Hussein Shikha, Ameneh Solati and Farah Al-Khoury. Curated by Yusser al Obaidi.
Having entered Parallel Portals of Crossing, we now call: O Companion of Time, guide us to navigate the remnants of times plural.
Sahib al-Zamaan, the Companion of Time, appears in Shia cosmology as one who remains present while hidden. His absence is not disappearance. The hidden Imam continues to accompany the world, like a sun behind clouds. His reappearance belongs to a time still to come, a time of divine justice.
In the wake of ongoing loss, the artists in this exhibition series relay our gaze to what remains: remnants of bodies, histories, traditions, landscapes, and worlds which persist, carrying the possibility of just futures yet to come.
We are living among the remnants of multiple times. Dom dom, tak dom, tak. The Masmoudy rhythm brings us to the edges of epochs, to the edges of colonial time. What is severed does not disappear. It remains as a trace, carrying memory with it.
What the marshes keep unfolds at the end of the world, where Hufaidh, an island in the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq, is said to appear and disappear. Iraqi and Mesopotamian mythology, Shia commemoration and mourning traditions determine what appears, what vanishes and what is reactivated.
In the Hawizeh marsh, where land and water have long been in continuous negotiation, oil enters the equation, contaminating the water and intensifying the vanishing landscape. Between Water and Oil brings us to testimonies of Ahwari life in the marshes, where the remains of past wars and present oil extraction compete with the future of the water.
What appears as absence may also be a hidden presence. What does it mean to live with what remains unseen? Can the traces of other times help us navigate the one we inhabit?
Ya sahib al-zamaan is an invocation to the Companion of Time. Can the hidden guide the present? O Companion of Time, guide us. Hasten your reappearance. We are among the remnants of the times.
Featuring works by Mohamed Abdelkarim, Hussein Shikha, Ameneh Solati and Farah Al-Khoury. Curated by Yusser al Obaidi.
Agenda
17 oct 2026