Alia Farid: Desert Terminal

Hajj Terminal Rest Stop, 2023. Polyester resin and fiberglass. Dimensions variable. Installation view in Islamic Arts Biennale Awwal Bait, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg. Photo: Marco Cappelletti. Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live About Contemporary Art Museum Houston (CAMH) and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) proudly partner to present Alia Farid: Desert Terminal, an exhibition of and about the infrastructures of movement tied to pilgrimage and migration.During a residency at Rivers in 2023, Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid traced the intertwined histories of industrial infrastructures and the mobility of people and materials across the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Mexico. For this exhibition, Farid recasts modular resin furniture originally designed for Jeddah’s 1981 Hajj Terminal, an open-air airport terminal afforded by a nascent oil economy and built as a modern point of convergence for pilgrims to Mecca. The furniture’s resin, a byproduct of petroleum extraction, is testament in both its matter and function to the way tradition is embedded and reconfigured in modernity. Farid arranges this furniture in CAMH into a sinuous seating installation stretching more than 400 feet. This architecture of pause and collective encounter is accompanied by an installation of Chibayish, the artist’s durational film project recorded in the Iraqi wetlands. Together, these works articulate meandering Gulf-to-Gulf relationships, rooted in landscapes marked by extractive industries and wars.Through these gestures of reconfiguring and recontextualizing, Farid traces the movements of pilgrimage, past and present, and its forms of and for gathering, waiting, and arriving. The installation invites reflection on both historical and contemporary experiences of migration forced by environmental crises, economic pressures, and war, with attention to U.S. interventions in the Global South, particularly the Middle East and Latin America. In this exhibition, resin gives shape to the conditions of modern mobility, even within sacred contexts. At once support and cartography, Desert Terminal charts the trajectories of people, of materials, and of power. Organizers This exhibition is co-organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, and curated by Patricia Restrepo, CAMH Curator, and Andrea Andersson, Rivers Founding Director and Chief Curator, with Jade Flint, Rivers Assistant Curator. Support Contemporary Arts Museum Houston exhibitions are made possible by the generous donors to CAMH’s Major Exhibition Fund: Scott R. Sparvero, Chinhui Juhn and Eddie Allen, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Beverly and Howard Robinson, Ruth Dreessen and Tom Van Laan, Cindy and David Fitch, Louise Jamail, Sissy and Denny Kempner, Elisa and Cris Pye, and Poppi Massey. About the Artist Alia Farid (born 1985, Kuwait; lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico) has had solo exhibitions in Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri; Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam; and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. Recent and upcoming group shows include participation in the Geneva Biennale Sculpture Garden, Whitney Biennial, Diriyah Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011 in MoMA PS1, Yokohama Triennale, and Asia Pacific Triennial. Alia Farid has a BFA from la Escuela de Artes Plásticas (San Juan), an MS in Visual Studies from the Visual Arts Program at MIT (Cambridge) and an MA in Museum Studies and Critical Theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents MACBA (Barcelona). In 2023 she received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, and in 2023-24 she was the David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Related Events View Calendar