Abdo Shanan
Dry

On view during the Edward W. Said Days daily 11 am to 9 pm
Free admission

Abdo Shanan was born in Algeria to an Algerian mother and a Sudanese father. When he was nine, he moved with his family to Libya, where he would spend 18 years of his life convincing himself that he was Algerian, while his father kept insisting that he was Sudanese. At the age of 28, Shanan decided to make Algeria his home, and it was then that he began to question his idea of belonging.

“I began to feel like I was an island in the middle of a society with which I didn’t have as much in common as I thought I did.”—How is it possible for an island to exist in the middle of an ocean? Is it because the island’s dry soil is strong enough to impose itself against the water surrounding it, or is the ocean merely tolerating the presence and existence of the island? Or is it a relationship of compromise in which both sides renounce part of their claim to the other in order to co-exist?

Dry is about all the “islands” Shanan has encountered throughout the past years: Lamia, who had left Algeria for France at the age of six and had been visiting each summer until she reached adulthood and her relationship with Algerian society became more complex. Or M’mmar, who has been living in the diaspora for 45 years and who will only return to die and be buried in Algeria, “because it is good to die there.” With Dry, Abdo Shanan wants to make the viewers feel uncomfortable and uneasy. He wants us to doubt what we have been told about belonging and national identities—for what do these social constructs mean anyway?