“It seems like what happened yesterday and today was expressed in the same way as things might happen tomorrow.”
“A Speaking Puddle of Blood” (O-Overgadan, Copenhagen, 23 May - 3 August) is a multi-layered show inviting its viewers to cross a threshold into a mythical yet familiar world where the metaphysical, spiritual and historical joins with the physical, inner and outer realms of the self and matter. Sallam’s work is a continuation of an existential journey articulating various deeply personal yet somehow collective narratives that arise from subconscious experiences and borne out of both philosophical and tangible, embodied research.
Through three acts, “or a movement of language in three steps,” on road number one that is nothing but the start of a search, Sallam invites her visitors on a journey through sculptures presenting themselves in different parts to tell a story. First through a portal to be welcomed by a jigsaw five-legged female ominous ghoul hand-carved from oak wood by Sallam, followed by a ceramic raven with a red hollowed gut lying flat on the ground; leading to a deconstructed fish head, with eyes and mouth on spikes with feet resembling those of a bird, framed by two ceramic sculptures that look like skeletal membranes of fossilized fins.
In the details of the oak sculpture lie secret numbers, five legs, four bellies, three boobs, two horns and one spike - the sum of which are 15, a sacred number in sufism, symbolizing the essence of creation. Thus the ghoul may portend danger for many, but in Sallam’s world, polarities exist simultaneously, and danger, once crossed, activates a higher level of spirituality and unlocks other dimensions.
Photo courtesy of: David Stjernholm
The three acts are guided and connected to a fourth element, a story authored by Sallam, in which the characters appear and come to life, piquing the visitors' curiosity to delve even deeper.
Sallam wittingly and seamlessly weaves together the visceral, liminal and metaphorical, giving it physical form, a new language that tries to decipher an inherited yet strange violent world. An ancient yet omnipresent sinister folk monster, violent events of the past morphing into the presence and future, in a wildly familiar yet mystical place, and the deep ever-expanding and contracting crevices and pathways of the psyche and human consciousness.
“Language is the existential loophole that allows access between in and out, the threshold that transports our consciousness between here and there, inside the body and outside it, from personal to collective, inside the house and outside, from my mind to a friend’s mind, a cat's mind, to a tree, wind, universe.”
Photo courtesy of: David Stjernholm
This body of work brings to mind previous projects by Sallam exploring the concept of duality, of polar opposites existing simultaneously, employing the symbol of the portal, both physically and metaphorically. “Where Language Goes to Hide” (Junsthal Kongegaarden, 2023), a wooden sculpture representing two simultaneous portals and depicting on opposite sides the eight-pointed Ishtar star, the dichotomous symbol of love and war in ancient Sumerian mythology, and “Memorial” (Kunsthalle Chrlottenborg, 2022) a wooden portal draped with a curtain of chunky beads made of dough and salt, an ode to historical events joined together by the theme of exodus. Being forced to ‘exit’ one place and ‘enter’ another either due to ethnic cleansing or scarcity of bread and the resulting state of statelessness and being forced to traverse the world in search of a place, an identity.
Sallam is a Palestinian Damascus-born hypnotherapist, sculptor and writer based in Copenhagen. Read more about her works here.