Naheed Raza:
Sculptor and filmmaker Naheed Raza was commissioned to create a new short film titled Sand. Shot at the edge of The Empty Quarter in UAE, Sand is a meditation on the strange, silent power of the desert. The transience, mobility and immersive quality of the shifting sand acts as a metaphor not only for time but also relates to thresholds of seeing, thinking and being.
The film dwells both on the peculiar nature of sand itself - which has baffled artists and scientists alike because of its unusual physical properties, between that of a solid and liquid - and also on our physical relationship with this material which is so fine, yet has the capacity to overwhelm us.
The piece references works such as Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes, J G Ballard's Drought City and Ralph Bagnold's Travels in a Dead World as well as the very real problem of escalating desertification. In the absence of commentary, projected on an immense scale in the front gallery and with its intense focus on 'pure materiality', Sand presents us with a hypnotic vision of an unstable world.
