Sugar Cane / Salt Flats, 2018

In 2013, during Tabet’s participation in HIWAR at Darat al Funun and while making The Dead Sea in Three Parts work, he came across the story of an archeological dig South of the Dead Sea that looked into the ruins of a mill which provided sugar to Jerusalem by sending the product across the Dead Sea on rowboats. The image of a boat floating atop the most saline body of water in the world filled with mounds of sugar seemed like a good beginning for a story, a scene or a sculpture. When  the artist was invited to take part in the 30-year anniversary of Darat al Funun he decided to look into the current economy of sugar and salt in Jordan and arrived at a sugarcane plantation in Al-Ramah and carnallite (a salt byproduct) produced by the Arab Potash Company, the exclusive miner of Dead Sea salt until 2058. The installation takes over the Ghorfa by confronting one ton of each of these two elements and proposes an interpretation of a historical event through the contemporary conditions of material production leaving the sugarcane to rot and the carnallite to disintegrate.

Darat al Funun, Amman, 2018

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points, 2007-ongoing

The shortest distance between two points is a line. A line is a construction of distance, in space, in time, in vision. It gives definition to form and position through connection and separation.

The Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Company was established in 1946 as a joint venture between Caltex, Esso, and Mobil. TAPLine was formed to build and operate a 1213 kilometer long 80 centimeter wide tube to transport oil through land. With this endeavor the company described three intersecting lines, an arc of history, geography, and geometry.

The pipeline replied to the tradition of a curved route through straits surrounding the Arabian Peninsula with a line cut into the Fertile Crescent. TAPLine proposed a straight connection from Dhahran to Haifa. The Partition Plan for Palestine forced an angle that redirected the line to Saida. Lebanon received the endpoint on a direct trajectory that delivered Saudi oil to America.

Contingent conditions produce temporary solutions. TAPLine accommodated changes in the region for three decades. In 1983, the line could no longer sustain the pressure from layered and adjacent political interests. The company was dissolved. The infrastructure was left on the land. The elements used to render it were released into a raw state. The terminal, the offices, the pump stations, and the pipe are not relics, but deposits of material.

The vitality of the present and our ability to remain within it must respond to the continuous pull of the lines leading to and away from it. The company’s imprint is the record of a rise and a fall, and the arc that binds them. It’s shadow runs parallel to the shifts in the land. In disuse, the infrastructure is a measurement manifested in marks, objects, and stories. These lines construct the present, and offer vantages for perceiving the distances they define.

Parasol Unit, London, 2019