Power games over the sky: Artist Hajra Waheed brings first solo UK show to BALTIC

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Hajra Waheed grew up under strict regulations including the prohibition of photographic and video documentation by civilians. Born in Canada, she was raised within the gated community of Saudi ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia – home to a quarter of the world's oil exports

Her first solo exhibition in the UK expands upon Still Against the Sky, a recent presentation at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Waheed's ongoing research into our current aerial occupation highlights the ever-increasing militarisation of the sky where the circulation of military drones and surveillance technology extends over everyday life often with lethal consequences.

Against this backdrop of borderless spatial power games, Waheed’s drawings, collages, videos and photo-based works emerge in the form of archives, fragments and field notes. The collected materials are used to construct new stories about marginalised histories.

In conditions of secrecy and isolation, Waheed developed a childhood obsession with identifying aircraft, tracking flight routes and keeping logs of her observations in her own secret visual language. Through news accounts and extensive research, Waheed follows characters in ongoing bodies of work that constitute a growing personal archive.

The mixed-media installation KH-21 2014 grew out of her earlier Architectural Studies 2011, a series of drawings in which cut-out details of spy planes accompany floor plans of historical mosques.

Bringing together a sound sculpture and a number of works on paper, KH-21 makes reference to the recently declassified HEXAGON Program of the United States’ National Reconnaissance Office, which launched 20 highly classified intelligence gathering satellites between 1971 and 1986.

Waheed's works navigate geographic and geopolitical distance, personal history and collective memory. She is interested in the codes and operations of security, surveillance, profiling, and wartime de-humanisation.

The Cyphers brings together a number of new works on paper including KH-21 Notes 1-32 2014, a collection of ongoing video works and The Scrapbook Project 1/3 2010-11.

• Hajra Waheed: The Cyphers is at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead until May 30 2016.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

More from Culture24's Art section

The year of Stanley Spencer: Galleries celebrate the life and works of an English genius

Artist uses X-ray scans of King Richard III's skull to create a forensic record of his remains

Five leading artists to be put to public vote as venues compete for Museums at Night's Connect! initiative

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting-and-drawing/art551986-hajra-waheed-saudi-arabia-baltic-gateshead