Urnamo

Wamidh Al-Ameri, Wathiq Al-Ameri und Ali Al-Fatlawi

February 5 – April 9 2012

Wamidh Al-Ameri, Wathiq Al-Ameri and Ali Al-Fatlawi together form the artists group Urnamo. The three artists have known each other since their childhood in Baghdad, from where they decided to escape in the late 1990s. Their adventurous odyssee led them to Jordan, Sudan and Lybia, before they came to Switzerland hidden in a train from Italy.
The three artists have their own individual careers, but at the same time they regularly work together in a group; for example for the sculptures on display in the main hall of Kunsthalle. They have produced three billboard figures with a hole which visitors can put their heads through. As the figures depict typical representatives of big world religions, religion is here primarily introduced as an interchangeable game, but secondly confronted with its own antithesis: inner faith has no relevance anymore when the spectator can choose a religion according to what looks best on him or her. The connections between religion, faith and outer appearance is also key to the two video animations in the same room: Religious Advertising (2009) assembles religious symbols into a colourful blinking neon sign in the shape of a church window, and Religious Fashion (2011) recombines typical garments of various religions into a fancy new outfit. The other works on display also derive from the artists’ own cultural heritage and identity; but they never become just presumptuous moral statements, but reveal the charming, funny and sometimes abysmally cynical side of intercultural dialogue.

Oliver Kielmayer