Pursuing Opacity: The Return of the Pink Balloon, 2024
Most dreams fade fast – no matter if good or bad. All the more fascinating if some stick around, for days, even years, or a lifetime maybe. Some of my childhood memories might have been dreams so vivid I can’t tell the difference between what was real and what was not. As if my dreams’ opacity harbored the psychological ambiguity between fact and fiction, I would rely on testimonies of family photos or other people’s memories, but then again, sometimes I wonder, is it really so important to make that difference?
It remains unclear whether the imagination of Mohamed Al-Bakeri’s protagonist poses a threat or haven but the thread that holds together what I see before me is the boy’s seeming displacement. Meandering between spaces of introspective voices and socio-political realms – Egypt is the context in which he seems to exist in. I follow what was left of the young boy’s conscious hallucination and his first birthday as it’s being monitored through the lens of a party guest’s camera. On floating chiffon I encounter him again, wearing a Yemeni Jambiya around his belly, I accompany the boy to a representation of Islamic prayer and follow a daring play with fire or his looking right back at me in a yellow gown. And in spite of the child’s response to my gaze, I can’t help but ask myself what will be left if my dreams are no longer my own? Throughout the appropriation of his spinning thought – nightmarish fragments interweave with subtle references to cultural, sexual or religious homogeneity –, I bear witness to the search for a glimpse of poetic calm within the storm.
Pursuing Opacity. Something borrowed from late Martiniquan poet Édouard Glissant’s writings where he calls into question the rational epistemic of Enlightenment’s emphasis on transparency in relating to others: "In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments (on the basis of reductive norms and universal truths)." In Mohamed Al-Bakeri’s Pursuing Opacity: The Return of the Pink Balloon I seem to be granted access only partially. Whether it’s the tensional layering of images on translucid fabrics or his metaphorical weaving of threads, histories and voices – it’s a feeling, or maybe Glissant who tells me to focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. To contradict the subjugating flattening of identities, everyone has the right to remain opaque, is what Glissant proposes. An ethical claim to transcend the assimilation of singularities within difference by mere comprehension and instead to acknowledge the unintelligibility of cross-cultural communication.
In the world of science, notions of opacity and transparency mark either end of a spectrum to describe how easily light will pass through matter. This seems simple but I’m still not quite sure if I grasp let alone comprehend it fully: If one way to disappear is to occupy the traces that already exist; to come to appear would mean to retract to the impenetrable shadows where "repetition leads to perpetual concealment, which is our form of resistance."
Antonia Rebekka Truninger