One Olive Tree Garden

Installation

Doha, QA
2024

In this commissioned work, Kaabi-Linke references the myth of the Orient and the labyrinthe anatomy of an olive tree. Viewers are invited to walk through segments of the tree arranged like a maze in a European garden. The experience is intended to be a riddle rooted in the Greek origins of the word labyrinth, meaning ‘double-headed axe,’ and questions the notion of the Orient as a puzzle that must be solved.

 

— Sara Raza

 

 

Lab Note #OneOliveTreeGarden

The olive tree symbolizes the Middle East and North Africa and is a typical pillar of Mediterranean agriculture. It is a natural symbol of unity, as humanity unites people. Yet, uprooted from its soil, sliced in pieces, analyzed and exploded in cross-sections, lithified in concrete, and isolated from its environment, it becomes a metaphor for the rationalized fabrication of Otherness, superior behavior, domination, and control. As the study of Edward Said showed clearly, any object of observation reflects the fear and needs of the observer and gives one tree the power to create a garden.

 

The artwork is a physical metaphor and display of invisible mechanisms and structures of the discoursive phenomenon that Edward W. Said elaborated on and conceived as Orientalism. Isolating objects from physical and social environments and historical contexts, analyzing, framing, and generalizing individual details and specific properties through abstractions, and aesthetic remixing and appropriating this mental and intellectual construction in eclectic images of Otherness are discursive back-end routines that, according to Said, run the European Orientalism.

 

 

 

Nadia Kaabi-Linke, “One Olive Garden Tree,” a new commission at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. For this affecting installation, the Tunis-born, Berlin-based conceptual artist cut a single olive tree into cross sections, which she then embedded in concrete-skimmed slabs. Visually, it looks like a Donald Judd sculpture sprouting unexpected life; it’s also a meditation on oneness and separateness. Visitors walk through the voids dividing the tree, which has generated a sort of indoor forest. At a time of widespread conflict, it’s also hard not to think about the olive branch as an emblem of peace, here exposed to its vulnerable heartwood

— Glenn Adamson

3-Dimensional

Media
Olive wood, spatula, oriented structure board, aluminium, and steel

Dimension
220 × 200 × 5 cm (each panel)
100 × 200 × 1 cm (steel stands)

Commissioned and co-produced by
Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Exhibition
“I Swear I Was There”, curated by Sara Raza. Part of “Seeing is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme.” Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar

Links
Exhibition Review, Artnet

Notes
#one_olive_tree_garden