Alla Abdunabi, I endured for you, 2025
Large-scale salt sculpture
(excerpt)
The construction of national identity is the leitmotif of “Made With Your Magic,” an ambitious, multi-country curatorial project launched last October by Tarek Abou El Fetouh. The Egyptian-born curator grounds his thesis in the maqam, a modal system of music that makes use of the quarter notes in between the eight notes of the tonal scale. The maqam is the basis for nearly all of what was once known as Oriental music, though it is less the sound than the styling that matters here. In 1932, at one of the earliest events of pan-Arabism, musicologists at the Cairo Congress re-classed the maqam as “Arab”—codifying its major forms and blithely overlooking the fact that the maqam draws from both Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups, such as the maqam Kurd or the maqam Nahawand, from the city in Iran.
...
The Ottoman Empire, signaled from the start, emerged as a key historical thread through the Tunis exhibition’s works. In the first venue, the Dubai-based artist Alla Abdunabi constructed a Barbary lion—once a symbol for empire, now extinct—out of salt, which disintegrated on the floor (I endured for you, 2025).