Ala Younis, artist and Co-Artistic Director of Singapore Biennale 2022’s says, “This question of estimation and calculation, of probing memories of war, upon thinking of nature, or any violence, and of a human body and how it finds its resemblance to far more complex settings and representations, are the foundations of Ali Yass’s work. By asking these questions, Yass was able to see the floods through the lens of his personal experience of displacement.”

Yass was born in Baghdad in 1992, when Saddam Hussein was president, and grew up in a country oppressed by one of history’s most vicious dictatorships, brutal economic sanctions, and US occupation.

“In the context of where I used to live, I had quite intense childhood memories. As a child, I was quite lucky to experience all of that intensity because I learned early how to deal with complexity, both literally and metaphorically. This remains a fundamental method in my artistic practice,” he says.

In 2008, his family relocated to Amman, Jordan, where he studied art at The University of Jordan and worked part-time at Dar Al-Anda Art Gallery. This experience also had a big impact on him. “When you’re young and going to art school, you start thinking about your practice in utopian terms. Creating art in a gallery, however, is very different from what you are taught in university, and quite complex logistically,” he says.

In 2017, Yass moved to Berlin where he is studying and working on his art at Berlin University of the Arts. With all these geographical relocations, he had to make small adjustments as well as big ones, including learning new languages. “This pushes me to adapt to different environments and ways of being,” he says.

In many of his projects, the constant change that is part of his life is reflected. A series of 70 drawings on paper, 1992; Now is currently on exhibition in different museums and private collections in Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen, and Amman. Yass says 1992; Now evokes fragments of his childhood self. “Between an occupation and the dismantling of a deadly siege, and a childhood and its drawings that drift further away.

“Recalling all my first sketches with their motifs and textures, it gives me certainty that these tracings form one extended biography in which creatures inhabited by apprehension reveal their tongues in a proclamation of thirst, and come to life with an epic sense of hope and brilliant colours. It is a seeking of justice that lies in the victory of poetic imagination over an abhorrent reality,” he explains.

His The Rainy Days series consists of 16 drawings on paper in different private collections in Berlin and Dubai. It was inspired by his childhood memory of leaflets thrown all around Iraq during the US occupation in 2003. To Yass, they seemed to “expand the battlefield to the skies, where warfare, climate and weather coalesce”.

He also makes experimental films such as Die Schatten überqueren die Brücke in der Nacht (The Shadows Cross the Bridge in the Night), a three-minute film that addresses themes of resistance by showing the same moment from three different moral perspectives.

Besides probing memories of war and violence in nature or within the body, his Singapore Biennale exhibition also explores the connection between water and dreams. According to Yass, both the world of dreams and flooded landscapes are liminal, in-between states with lasting effects.

“With both dreams and floods, you live with the aftermath of the event. There’s also an unstable, non-linear environment that arises in both states that inspires my imagination and practice. In my works on paper, I often begin unconsciously with fluid ink or fluid colours, then attempt to shape a form from them. The process is a lot like life after a flood or a disaster, when creatures, plants, and animals start to grow organically. This is how forms come to life in my paintings or films,” he says.

Currently, Yass is learning how to make prints on stones. “Lithography gives me that painterly feeling realised through a unique raw material. It’s a nice mixture of craft and creativity. I’m also working with Berlin-based Sudanese artist Ahmed Isamaldin on a show using multimedia and robotics that will be exhibited in a number of universities in the US in 2024,” says Yass.

Die Flut (The Flood) can be seen at the Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark until March 19.

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