Sidi’s works straddle blatant exposure and tight constraint, fragility and formal and conceptual distillation, documentation and reproduction, uncovering and concealment. The precise, tempestuous move that informs her work reveals raw nerves sensitive to individual existence within local and global cultural and political actuality. Her artistic language responds to reality with a combination of great urgency and sharp conceptualization. Sidi worked in the turn of the century, which was also a millennial turn – a time that held promise of progress toward a better, utopian world, as well as anxiety, a sense of chaos, and fear of what may be coming. Reflecting local and international art tendencies of the period, this duality is manifested in her work in the tension between abundance and spectacularity on the one hand and minimalism and introversion on the other; between alienation and mechanization on the one hand, and blunt expressiveness on the other.
Sidi’s work combines painting, photography, and digital processing alongside work in industrial materials, such as vinyl and Plexiglas. A severe modernist outlook is coupled in her work with postmodern narrative and figural expressions, resulting in a rhizome of perspectives and traumatic, passionate images that are terrible and beautiful at the same time. Her work strives to understand chaotic reality – the power of life and its inherent despair – not by inventing “original” images but by exploring the acceptability and reliability of existing ones.
The works on view in the museum unfold large, monochromatic, dark and menacing vistas, in which much remains unexplained. Are these exterior or interior views, organic or artificial, nightscapes or dayscapes? The highly geometric nature of the composition is disrupted by elements such as a seemingly random rip in the vinyl sheet, dripping paint, collaged surfaces, and the inclusion of narrative and symbolic images, such as drops, tears, and circles, which recur throughout the dark space of the pictures. These images bring to mind wheels, lids, or huge turbines, as well as mysterious moons, breasts, and vaginas; openings that are mechanical and erotic at the same time, ultimately transforming into the eye motif, into a gaze. In Sidi’s work, the silence of the grid turns into restrained, agitating noise.
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