Lanes

“Before beginning her artistic career, Al-Sîndy studied biology and chemistry. This part of her education also included scientific drawing, an underpinning that significantly shapes her graphic work. (…)

The works have two things in common: on the one hand, they were all created en plein air. On the other hand, the artist directs her attention to vegetation and processes in plant life.

(…) Al-Sîndy’s new group of works »Spuren« (»Traces«) (2021) consists of several drawings and a video capturing their genesis. In a forest, again showing signs of human influence, the artist transfers the root system’s expansive spread through the ground onto long pieces of paper, basing her drawings both on visual observation and the tactile experience of feeling her way across the surface of the soil. Pruning and root trimming have caused damage here too. Through the approach she adopts, Al-Sîndy’s drawings also trace how trees communicate with their severed underground network, via processes only recently explored in biology.

Images of memory, reactions in our minds, decomposition processes in the soil, deposits of history, plant growth, as well as communication and nature’s self-healing power – in her works, artist Havîn Al-Sîndy renders these invisible processes visible. In the process, she makes us realise we should not rely on just one sense – sight – in our view of reality, but should also bear in mind that some processes lie beyond our (limited) perception.”

Text: Sven Beckstette