Analepsis of the Green Shelter
I created an installation about gardens during a recently completed one-year residency at Cité International Des Arts in Paris, France. The installation consisted of researching the cultivation and care of various botanic realms and how they reflect different traditions and philosophies within them, showing their deep connection to the human condition.
Comprising different interdisciplinary mediums, the art occupies every part of a space within a room, with different concepts and ideas coming together to create one immersive garden.
Ever since the beginning of time, we have prized every opportunity to bend nature to our will. For millennia, farmers and gardeners without any knowledge of genetics have used forced breeding to bring out plant traits that are new and useful to humans. This “Artificial Selection” is evidence of the Human’s ever present need to control nature.
An ideal illustration of this concept emerges in “The Garden,” where the human taming of plants and meticulous architectural green designs are all man-made. Why do humans feel so drawn to the enclosure of outdoor space? Is it because horticulture feels healing?
The garden has long been a familiar part of the home, but it also simultaneously connotes a distant connection to the wild, thus engendering an analepsis to our early indigenous ancestors who inhabited nature and nature inhabited them.
My installation is an arrangement of customized foliage and landscapes that create our personal histories and stories. The way the garden is created and assembled—from color palettes to the distortion of shapes, spaces, and plants—reflect and mirror One’s beliefs, philosophies, politics, religions, and emotions.
These gardens may be as far away from reality as Eden, or as near as our own backyard. However, these green shelters—in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation—undeniably stand as restorative, nourishing, and necessary havens where poetry, art, desires, love, and culture come to bloom and secrets come to eternally rest.
Gardens bestow upon us the privilege to momentarily escape the inexorable vices and grime of humanity and to also immerse oneself in a bewitching yet distorted manufactured approach to Mother Nature.
Saudi Arabian artist Mo’sen Binnalee began his art career after moving to Sharjah in 2013. There, he became involved with several art institutions, participated in shows, attended art classes, and worked as an art assistant. He now holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has exhibited and participated in international shows and residencies.
Binnalee’s work investigates the correlations between the collective perception of nature and our place in it through the use of myth, society, and science as reference points. His work examines the freedoms and boundaries of humans while experiencing nature.
Binnalee materializes his thoughts by using several different mediums. He experiments with wood, clay, metal, hives, and living organisms through sculpting, printmaking, collage, painting, video, and interactive installations.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mosen_binnalee/
Film by Line Itani: https://www.instagram.com/lineitani/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/line-itani/
Original sound by Thea Sotie:
https://www.instagram.com/theasoti/
With support from Al-Mansouria Foundation:
https://www.instagram.com/almansouria_foundation/
https://www.facebook.com/AlMansouriaFoundation/