Al Kadiri has long been preoccupied with the collective: the migrant crisis, sites of war, destruction, detention, and the living legacy of the malheur arabe, as Samir Kassir would have it. His previous work on the refugee struggle, Ashes to the Sea, foregrounded the wreckage of mankind—a murderous sea heaving with death, claiming lives indiscriminately. Arcadia constitutes a major re-framing of Al Kadiri’s worldview. The personal micro-story overtakes collective drama: the charcoal portrait sparks the unraveling of an almost filmic narrative, complete with a backstory, sequencing and episodes. Gone is the freeze-framed maelstrom of the conquering sea, littered with instantly understood media imagery. Instead, we as viewers, much like the protagonists of Arcadia themselves, begin a story. The portrait is by an unknown hand, offered to the viewer in a photograph an image twice removed. We are told the sitters were relatives of one of Al Kadiri’s friends: a couple that set out to sea and have not been heard from since. As part of the prologue, excerpted words from a sailing dictionary swirl across the wall. Are they already dead? You ask. You will never know. Al Kadiri cultivates a delectable distance. He stands behind appropriated imagery—the “found” portrait, for a start, but also the recognizably photo-like poses in the cork-based works, the hero couple monumentalized. Here, everything is a fiction. Impermanence is part of the journey. Charcoal is a slippery material in an artist’s hands: it shifts, changes and will ultimately vanish. An unknown artist rendered the couple in charcoal, as did Al Khadiri for almost all of the subsequent drawings and paintings. Charcoal- on-canvas images of joined hands—reassuring invitations to venture into the Edenic wilds— punctuate the flow of works in Arcadia. Nothing lasts, we understand. The “real-life” couple, framed in a sunny moment for a portraitist, melds into an idyllic fiction. Can Arcadia exist?”
Excerpts from a text by Kevin Jones, “This is the tale of a journey… It begins with a prologue”