Waèl El Allouche

Every expected is happening
2025. Multi-media installation, dimensions variable.

Waèl Allouche’s artistic practice visualises the contributions to global science and technology that have emerged over the centuries from the Arab world. His new site-specific installation in Cairo references the figure of Muhammed Abduh using fictional AI-scripted text in which his original musings on ethics and technology are used to programme a speculative meditation that describes a changing contemporary world. The script and objects reference the Nilometer as a device that provides an object-oriented and non-human perspective on regional history. Several columns stand like those that predicted the flooding of the Nile for millennia and provide the context for an oral history of Islamic science and technology situated within the heraldic poetry tradition of “hilaly” in order to weave a new speculative play on the interconnected history of technology and North Africa.

Abduh reflects on the legendary figures of Ibn Haytham, the brilliant scientist, and Abu Zayd al-Hilali, the valiant warrior from the Banu Hilal tribe. Abduh then reflects on the Nilometer itself, a testament to ancient technology, and contemplates the telescope, a modern marvel born from Ibn Haytham’s legacy. He recognizes the duality of technology, its potential for both progress and destruction, and the need for new heroes to guide humanity towards a brighter future. Abduh’s mind weaves a tapestry of their journeys, imagining Ibn Haytham deciphering the Nilometer’s markings alongside Abu Zayd, sharing tales of bravery and scientific discovery. He admires Ibn Haytham’s cunning in feigning madness to escape death and contrasts it with the Hilali warriors’ fearless charge into battle. This duality serves to connect the role of banu Hilal both as valiant warrior as well as a leading factor in the arabization of the Maghreb and the ecological degradation of the region using the measure of the Nilometer as a marker of the ebbings of chaos and control.