Shourouk Rhaiem: A Night of a Lifetime - Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMoCA), Jeddah
As we see marriage rates plummet in much of the global north, a trend detected as early as the seventies in America, our tendency to look to Western frontiers as cultural and moral harbingers – and indeed arbiters – means there is this faulty and telling expectation that the rest of the world will follow exact-suite. This is partly why SAMoCA’s "A Night of a Lifetime", in Diriyah’s Jax district – an exhibition which explores the rituals and gestures surrounding marriage in the region – appeared predictable but disarmingly endearing at the same time, much like marriage itself. The meta themes of the show do not end there – an unabashed celebration of kitsch, performance and ritual, it is impossible to visit without feeling a sense of juvenile anticipation, a feeling that is all the more stark in an era of digital-aloofness and which has rendered monocultural events extinct. It’s colours and textures evoke an almost primordial excitement for the cultural feast that is the marital union – over and above love itself; that imagined space that love supposedly graduates into that is, despite itself, also becoming increasingly elusive and spectre-like for young people in the MENA region, for whom marriage is no longer an inevitable outcome.
The finale of "A Night of a Lifetime" is the fittingly opulent Le Trousseau by French Tunisian jewellery designer and artist Shourouk Rhaiem, which, as its name suggests, consists of a litany of domestic objects, though unexpectedly, encrusted with Swarovski crystals. Placed in a darkening chamber, Rhaiem intended for the changing effect of the light to convey the contrast between image and reality – the objects oscillate between the extraordinary and mundane, highlighting the contradictions perceived in domestic life. A fitting end to the exhibition, it calls into question the various changes in economics and gender dynamics, and broader feeling of disillusionment, that are leading the charge away from marriage, in very different ways and at different paces, both at home and abroad.
