Tradition & modernity
Tradition and Modernity is ultimately a series about society’s transformation from tradition to our present modern day. Malluh has utilized photograms; toying with objects and experimenting with different arrangements to create a playful expression of collective and personal experiences.
Occasionally understood as a force of “retention”, tradition can cause some to feel the need to isolate themselves from modernity’s monstrous reach. With the gateway to Paris opened, modernity and its accompanying high-speed aircrafts find people screened, probed, and investigated. All is exposed, leaving no room for privacy. The objects chosen in these photogramic collages include trinkets relating to the country’s cultural heritage and present experience of modernity – part of Saudi Arabia’s material cultural DNA. Considering this multilayered history of past and present, the photograms can be posited in a discursive practice that attempts to deconstruct modernity’s obscene obsession with material culture.
‘Tradition and Modernity’, with its creative employment of photograms, is a nostalgic expression for aesthetic appreciation of the everyday, the simple, the humble.
