Urban Objects
2022
Lightart
Aseel Alamoudi’s Urban Objects (2022) is an urban experiment that rethinks the formal qualities of street furniture and generates new autonomies to reimagine their status in public spaces. The artist has developed eight site-specific objects of different type and scale – a bench, a wall – and has scattered them throughout the city. While standing in for common urban objects, each piece is individually designed rather than being one of many mass-produced, monotonous elements that are situated within/imposed into the landscape.
The pieces are placed in different settings across Riyadh to explore the role that context plays in defining architectural and urban objects in public space. A design language is developed between the objects: they use colored, transparent materiality and are “activated” with artificial lighting.
Through experiments with light, shadow and texture, the objects collectively acquire qualities that allow visitors to interpret them differently and imagine them in multiple narratives. These objects are able to create dialogue with their surroundings, becoming, as public art, items that add to a specific urban context rather than concealing it.