Visual Project

Dear (younger) Sumayya

1. There is always architecture waiting to happen in places that are overlooked:

2. You will soon fall in love with gold, kitsch, supernatural ideas,

3. with very strange and everyday things – a disco-church on wheels in the inner-city,

4. the performance of a ritual gathering on a patch of veld-grass of a traffic island next to a highway,

5. the rhythms and space of an Ethiopian coffee ceremony,

6. the smell before a highveld thunderstorm,

7. the choreography of Fordsburg on a Friday before, during and after prayer time,

8. the specific colour spectrum of a mine-dump sunset,

9. the tenacity of indigenous plants and indigenous ceremonies and practices – all the magic that is Joburg. There is another canon here.

10.  Ingest atmospheres – learn how to read and feel colour, dust, mist, the phases of the moon. There is another canon here.

11.  Look at these things deeply.

12.  Feel them, absorb them.

13.  You will soon develop a mistrust for the historical record. Listen to that.

14.  Look so deeply at what is present that you notice the silences and the absences too. There is yet another canon here, in these silences and absences.

15.  Read in other languages.

16.  Write in your mother tongues. Look deeply at sentence structure and vocabulary. There is another canon here.

17.  Learn how to dissect the index of an archive.

18.  And how to make your own indexes for archives.

19.  Stay soft and sensitive – it is a deep strength, and architecture needs it. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.

20.  Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that everything you can ever imagine has already been done. They are incorrect.

21.  Beauty and social justice are not mutually exclusive. Beauty is social justice.

22.  There are an infinity of untold stories, unheard voices, unrealised dreams, undreamt worlds.

23.  Poetry is a necessity.

24.  And dreaming is everything.

Love

(older) Sumayya

The shape, colour and materiality of this work came through the Joburg sunset. When it is clear, the Joburg sky moves gracefully and soundlessly through shades of all the colours you have never known, as the sun drops behind the horizon line at the end of a day.

The pollution, dust and chemical particles in Joburg’s air, produced by its legacy of mining, create a colourscape of refracted light and inorganic pigments that can be considered visually beautiful.

Serpentine Pavilion 2020 plus 1, designed by Sumayya Vally, Counterspace. The Pavilion’s design is based on past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging across several London neighbourhoods significant to diasporic and cross-cultural communities, including Brixton, Hoxton, Tower Hamlets, Edgware Road, Barking and Dagenham and Peckham, among others.

The forms in the Pavilion are a result of abstracting, superimposing and splicing elements from architectures that vary in scales of intimacy, translating the shapes of London into the Pavilion structure in Kensington Gardens.

The Pavilion is built of reclaimed steel, cork and timber covered with micro-cement. The varying textures, and the hues of pink and brown, are drawn directly from the architecture of London and reference changes in the quality of light.

Bernardine Evaristo and Jacqueline De Peza performing in Chiaroscuro, written by Jackie Kay, directed by Joan Ann Maynard, set and costume design by Helena Roden, 1986. The play was produced by the Theatre of Black Women, Britain’s first Black women’s theatre company, founded by Evaristo, Patricia Hilaire and Paulette Randall in 1982.

The carnival, organised by Claudia Jones, was known as the Caribbean Carnival or the West Indian Gazette Carnival and was held indoors at St. Pancras Town Hall. It would not be until 1964 that the carnival would move outside onto the streets of Notting Hill. Picture shows one woman having a good time at the event (30 January 1959).

Exterior of what was then Roots Community, now 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. The centre was founded in response to the social unrest as a result of racism and discrimination experienced in British cities, and continues to have a significant impact on the arts, cultural and education worlds, particularly for Black and Caribbean artists.

Admiral Ken with his Box Men, Hackney. Admiral Ken was one of the big sound system owners and producers in Hackney at the time. His ‘box men’ loaded and unloaded the speaker boxes and amps, and together the group performed at venues like Four Aces and Hackney Town Hall.

The Four Aces Club was a pioneering music and recreational space on Dalston Lane in Dalston, London. Based in a building that had formerly been the North London Colosseum and Amphitheatre and then a cinema, in the 1960s and 1970s the club became one of the first venues to play Black music in the United Kingdom.

Fired and unfired clay vessels are assembled as a temporal space to hold gatherings.

A series of performances that draw on the traditions of rain-making and harvest is performed in the space where the hands that formed the pots also work to un-form them. The rituals include the use of water, which allows the un-fired pots to dissolve over time, revealing areas and niches of gathering contained by the pots, as well as rhythmic drumming that evokes the sound of thunder at the end of each day.

The inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale (2023), Jeddah, was commissioned and produced by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation and was curated by Sumayya Vally alongside Dr. Julian Raby, Dr. Omniya Abdel Barr and Dr. Saad Al-Rashid. Islamic Arts Biennale, scenography by OMA.

The biennale fragments inspire, narrate and render visible wisdoms, imaginations and futures of “home” and spiritual placemaking, from the scale of the body to the scale of the cosmos. Artists explore these themes through contemporary interpretations of instruments of home.

An enclosure that recalls the humility of this first musalla (“a place to pray”), inspired by one of the first mosques to be built, the Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuH) in Al-Madinah al-Munawwarah.

The walls are formed from local palm reeds woven together by Saudi artisans, recalling how temporary prayer spaces were once created along travel and pilgrimage routes. Gaps in the walls allow glimpses of the landscape where indigenous plants bloom, evoking the historic gardens of Madinah. Light from above falls on a slit that stands for the mihrab, emphasising the role of the sun as a compass determining the direction as well as the times of prayer.

Traditionally, mosque courtyards featured a sundial that indicated the time of the five daily prayers, and mosques served as spaces where the general public could align their sense of time with the movement of the heavenly bodies. 

The installation tracks the movement of a beam of sunlight passing over lines on the ground corresponding to the hours, months and seasons, as well as sculptural objects that indicate significant moments in Islamic history.

The floor installation explores the bond that unites all people – “We Are All Made of Earth.” Using clay from the Ourika Valley and natural pigments from across Morocco, Bouhchichi has created tiles in various shades that address the complexity of difference in geography, geology and people.