Rihab Essayh is an interdisciplinary artist building worlds and large-scale installations. Her recent tactile and immersive environments emerge from her efforts to support the conditions for “radical softness” – an idea that suggests that showing emotions and vulnerability is a political gesture in a society that prioritizes intellect and indifference. Based on principles of empathy, belonging, and care, Essayh is interested in the human state in a digital age when part of our identity and social encounter reside online, particularly important in the context of the pandemic and its drastic social and emotional impacts. In terms of technical expertise, Rihab is deepening her knowledge of materials to move her practice forward. She seeks to foster a feeling of ambivalence in the viewer, with the interest of blending personal, analytical and universal attributes. Essayh uses lightness and delicacy that is the cumulative effect of the constructed landscape to speak to her vision of a soft futurism; an imagined future, a hopeful new space that is de-centering, intersectional, inclusive, and radically soft.
In this exhibition, of longing and songbirds, an ethereal floating tent “الغسق لجوقة العصافير عند الغسق (Longing for a choir of sparrows at dusk),” is spray-painted with the colours of the sunrise she experienced in her new home in Guelph, Ontario, and accompanied by a sound recording of birds heard in the early mornings. Made when the artist felt most isolated and in need of comfort, the tent became a place where she could feel secure, find rest, and land softly.
