Artist Azza El Siddique creates deeply poetic ephemeral room-sized installations where technology and tradition, personal and cultural significance meet. Juxtapositions are at the core of her work: the sacred and experimental, ephemerality and sensuousness, the mythological and digital, antiquity and futurism… Born in Khartoum, Sudan and educated in Canada and the United States, El Siddique’s work draws upon her Sudanese heritage and, more recently, her research into ancient Egyptian and Nubian architecture and funerary traditions. Fabricating an austere architecture both as frame and portal to the past, she collapses time creating spaces for contemplation. At the core of each installation one encounters impermanence and dissolution of materials, as if clues from the past – broken shards, degrading porcelain, cracks in clay developing through highly controlled irrigation – that one might find on an archaeological dig. Employing aromatic incenses and robotics, she creates haunting milieu where spectators come face to face with erosion, decay, that which is shattered. In El Siddique’s art of making there is also repair: filling her late brother’s 1993 Nissan pickup truck with his music, voice memos, and candy-colored visuals transforms it into both a mobile mortuary temple and a ritual of remembrance, bridging personal mourning with public expression.

photo by Pat Garcia Jr.