About Fatima Moallim: Meeting the charged at eye level
Text written by Mara Lee

Charging (weather, air)
I The will to live artist Fatima Moallim shows drawings made during her time as an Iaspis Fellow at ISCP in New York, 2022. The exhibition's title is grand and at the same time almost uncomfortably honest. These qualities – the grand and the uncomfortably honest – run like a basic chord through the works; a charge that meets the viewer at eye level.

Where does this charge consist? It is reminiscent of an atmosphere, something that permeates everywhere. The American writer and professor Christina Sharpe has described what permeates all aspects of an environment as “weather”. And in the United States, the weather is special. The air smells of freedom but carries a history (and contemporaneity) of unfreedom, violence and discrimination that is ever present. Perhaps this is part of the charge in Moallim’s work. An air so dense that it can almost be touched.

The Bic pen: how the smallest can accommodate the largest
Moallim faces this new weather with tools and materials that she is well familiar with, such as pencil and oil crayon, and of course the Bic pen, which has become something of her signature. The Bic pen is a simple everyday object that everyone can afford, and you can easily put it in your breast pocket. At the same time, its four-color palette opens up a larger space: blue like the sky, green like the sea, black like the earth and red like fire. The idea that you can carry the four elements in your breast pocket, close to your heart, is dizzying. This also has implications for vision: When the smallest is able to accommodate the very largest, our perspectives are challenged. Our concepts of proximity and distance, background and foreground, are set in motion.

What is a bow?
As in Moallim's previous exhibitions, geometric shapes play a central role, and in The will to live they are further deepened. From the studio in Williamsburg, a city in constant reconstruction is visible. In, for example, “Noise” and “Power Plant” we encounter industrial buildings, shapes that resemble bridges, ramps, houses and buildings that enclose thin, long, narrow human-like figures, drawn with a Bic pen.

Form, geometric form, becomes a way of exploring vision and place. What is an arch in an urban landscape where thousands of people sleep outdoors, without shelter, every night? What is a rectangle? A door? And what is a grid in a city where privatization is increasingly spreading to public spaces and infrastructure?

Geometry and struggle
One of the most striking forms in The will to live is the triangle in the drawing “Malcolm”. The title and the lying figure in the lower part of the drawing lead to thoughts of the assassination of Malcolm X. Above, a black triangle floats. The two figures are connected by a line. Through the different materials – pencil and oil crayon – and their respective rhythm and temporality, a strange perspective shift occurs: the viewer becomes uncertain about what is up and down, behind and in front. As if the drawing wants to say: If perspective is about proximity and distance, it is also about alienation and intimacy.

The geometric shapes in Moallim's drawings house time, life, movement, emotions. Sometimes as support, sometimes as threat, but always in connection with each other. Never alone in self-sufficient perfection. This emphasizes an open vulnerability that asks questions rather than establishes, an active, open and spatial practice. The triangle does not point towards transcendence, but towards contemplation and struggle here and now: a form for meeting the large, charged and uncomfortable at eye level.

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Fatima Moallim received the Academy of Fine Arts' exhibition scholarship from the Folke Hellström-Linds Fund in 2022. The scholarship includes an exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts, funds to carry out the exhibition, and an exhibition catalog.