Art Basel Miami Beach

AZZA EL SIDDIQUE

Final Fantasy

6.12 – 10.12. 2023
Miami Beach Convention Center
Booth P11

Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to present a new major project by emerging Sudanese-Canadian artist Azza El Siddique conceived specifically for Art Basel Miami Beach in the Positions sector. El Siddique’s installation, entitled Final Fantasy, culminates the artist’s investigations into metalwork, ceramics, and transformable matter, presented in a new immersive sculptural environment that is both ambitious in scope and material complexity. El Siddique’s immersive installation acts as part laboratory, part archeological ruin. True to the material alchemy for which El Siddique has become known, the diverse materials encompassing her installation—steel, water, porcelain—gradually oxidize into unpredictable states. This project continues the artist’s ongoing research into Egyptian and Nubian myths, histories, and mortuary practices, reinterpreted through contemporary poetic materiality.

The installation features a large square steel fountain with a central column. The fountain includes a platform over a basin with both unfired and bisque-fired clay vessels. Over time, the unfired vessels undergo erosion and transformation, while the bisque-fired vessels become colored by rusty water droplets slowly dripping from the steel scaffolding above. The central column houses monitors on each of its four sides, with looped video featuring texts from ancient Egyptian and Nubian funerary texts, such as the ‘Book of Two Ways.’ The booth is flanked by two cement sculptures of the artist’s Doberman in a sphinx position.

In El Siddique’s Final Fantasy, viewers encounter sensorial curiosities reminiscent of a mausoleum or tomb. Yet, unlike the sort of sterile longevity attributed to traditional archeological artefacts and sites, such as those maintained by 19th-century colonial expeditions, El Siddique’s artworks are ruins in constant states of becoming. The artworks, ripe with possibility and discovery, seek to erode the stories and knowledge systems that are embedded into these histories, and reinterpret them anew. Unlike the permanence inherent to stone sculptures, bronze monuments, and steel cities, El Siddique’s ephemeral work welcomes change, questioning the permeability of monuments and the historized acceptance of the colonial legacies they embody. Drawing from archival, personal, and mythological references, El Siddique links past and present and creates a sort of counter-monument in celebration of reimagined Egyptian and Nubian stories.

To consult to fair’s website, click here.