Altars Journeys Islands Graves

In this work, Hasan Hujairi presents four seemingly disconnected narratives that blur boundaries between personal memories, fiction, conjunction on accounts of King Solomon's Fleets, and a historiography of the Red Sea. This audiovisual work, an exploration of the position of humanity (and how it may see itself) in the face of longue durée, is then pulled in together by a generative music composition that algorithmically replicates - and in many cases fails to replicate -  musical gestures learned from archival songs of the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula.  

The work was first presented at Hayy Jameel (Jeddah, KSA) between 8 May 2024 and 26 October 2024 as part of a group exhibition entitled ‘Salt-Kissed: Of Vessels That Have Sailed The Red Sea’, which was co-curated by Ahmed Al-Aqra and Abed Alrahman Shabaneh. Presentation was in the form of a triptych-like three channel video, with two channels showing looping animated images (based on images shown below) along with a central video that had text that was being narrated of four separate stories/anecdotes/personal experiences/speculations on history.