The “Gates to the Sea” is a public art installation created by Lebanese sculptor Simone Fattal and installed in 2019 outside the National Museums of Qatar in Doha. The rectangular-shaped and vertically aligned grey sculpture is mostly made out of clay. The art resembles a rectangular portal connecting two dimensions of life – earthbound and marine. The piece was “inspired by the ancient petroglyphs found in Qatar at Al Jassasiya”(1). It depicts boats and fish highlighting that Qatar’s history is inseparable and inextricable from the sea.
The sculpture is an allusion to the time and place connecting both human and non-human natures. “Time is the great conceit of the sculptures of Simone Fattal and her figures look as old as the earth and yet they breathe”(2). Indeed, the ‘gate’ looks like an ancient artifact having the rock carved, and petroglyphs imprinted. Qatar Museums comments on this sculpture as the doorway between the past of Qatari’s pearl diving and the present of oil and gas extraction(3). In this blog post, I am going to argue that it’s effective to use allegories together with postmodernist public art in order to capture ecological connectedness and cultural heterogeneity at the same time. For this, I am going to rely on the skepticism of allegory and its alternative representations from the chapter “From the Blue Planet to Google Earth” in Ursula K. Heise’s book ‘Sense of Place, Sense of Planet’ (2008).
As Ursula argued allegory has infiltrated the global environmental imagination and thought. Her claims it to create a vision that will be more complex than allegory and that will be “ able to accommodate social and cultural multiplicity”(4). She described allegories as tools to treat the complexities of the world as simplicities and see the world as a whole(5). Allegories ignore the political and cultural heterogeneity, as well as the harmony and balance of the global ecology(6). She suggests experimenting with mixing allegory with other genres in order to solve that failure. This could be done by combining “allegory with modernist and postmodernist experimental modes”(7). taking this into consideration, it’s then a question whether “The Gates to the Sea” is a modernist or postmodernist public art.
From one perspective, the implicit connotation is progress, from fishing and pearl diving, the Qatari nation entered the era of oil and gas extraction. Thus, the sculpture makes an allegory of the ‘gates of progress’ or ‘gates of ‘modern civilization’. From another perspective, the sculpture explicitly doesn’t say much about the connection between humans and marine life. It’s only the text near the sculpture that states it clearly that this sculpture represents the doorway to the sea. However, judging from first sight, the rectangular-shaped sculpture with ancient petroglyphs and the carvings of fish and boats give an insight into the past relationship between local people and the sea. This is where we get to know the small portion of Qatari cultural heterogeneity Ursula Heise was talking about. Yet the sculpture doesn’t address the ecological equilibrium directly the sculpture conveys that no matter how the ecology of the sea transforms and no matter how imbalanced it becomes, the ‘gates to the sea’ will always be there.
- Nabeela, “National Museum of Qatar unveils details of structure and what’s inside ahead of 28 March opening,” Arts&Culture, I Love Qatar, March 19, 2019, https://www.iloveqatar.net/news/artsCulture/national-museum-of-qatar
- Fattal, Simone, “On Simmone Fattal,” Simmone Fattal, https://www.simonefattal.com/on-simone-fattal/
- “Gates to the sea by Simmone Fattal,” Qatar Museums, https://qm.org.qa/en/visit/public-art/gates-to-the-sea/
- Ursula K.Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21
- Ibid, 63
- Ibid, 63-64
- Ibid, 64
