93. Constructing Mecca | Artworks

Enter the Mecca Minecraft! With me, you can make and remake the city, break it down, reconstruct it to fulfill your wishes. New towers, new apartments, slick pavements and city corners, smart cars and marble statues: I am the Mecca of the future, crystallised in every child’s imagination. Through reinventing the city, time and again, in an endless chain of perpetual movement and change, creating amazing new structures, crystal towers, palaces and castles, mosques and praying grounds, I help instill in the future generation the belief that all this can change, all this can be better, all this must be the best in the world.

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