A trance ritual, an island, a festival between desert and sea, fishermen in animal masks, a camel chewing trash and a young man dancing to a love song. The sequence of Alia Farid’s mythopoetic meandering, At the Time of the Ebb do little to elucidate the context of the film but much to delineate the essayistic aesthetics of an artist versed in the complexities of subjective self-determination from the margins of representation. – Curator Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber/Look for Me All Around You. 

At the Time of the Ebb, 2019
Single-channel video-loop, stereo
15:43 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès,
Paris
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation

At the Time of the Ebb, 2019, saw the artist travel one-hundred nautical kilometres from the easternmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Iranian island of Qeshm. Here, she filmed the annual celebration of Nowruz Sayadeen (‘Fisherman’s New Year’). Such is the stage for Farid’s film essay, a melancholic meandering through the surviving festival traditions of an island seemingly cast out of time or, rather, living according to a rhythm very much of its own, attuned to ancient seasonal cycles. The work foregrounds a number of local residents, whose performances draw attention to their customs,
traditions, material surroundings and natural environment–from a brightly decorated domestic interior to an expansive sea view overlooking the Arabian Gulf.