60.The Seven Sisters (Stones from Stoning the Devil) |…

We are the seven sisters. The seven sins. We stand at the edge of the earth, and are thrown at the devil’s wall. They say the Prophet saw the devil here, in the middle of what was once an empty land. So we are thrown at the devil, one for each company, one for each sin.

The devil has three pillars in Jamarat, each a temptation of its own. So you turn to each wall, to ensure it feels the seven pebbles. Here, your can repudiate yourself and your actions, casting aside the basest elements of humanity. But if you so much as try to run away, the crowds will threaten your very life.

This work transcends the objects. Ultimately, what I’m working with isn’t only the artefacts themselves, but the stories attached to them. For me, each tale is the manifestation of the object, and each object is a tangible materialisation of an underlying narrative. The work finds its equilibrium somewhere between the stories and chronology they’re chaptered into, the objects becoming knots or points along the timeline, woven into stories as part of the language of this artwork. Each story draws out a tale that intends to trigger imagination and memory, mixing fact with fiction, with the ultimate aim of straddling, conflating and confusing fixed notions of history to open up the unofficial histories that shape the character of place and memory.
Ahmed Mater
2014