Text by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings
September 2020
Gaby Sahhar, Truth and Kinship, 2020
Dimensions variable, 9 min 26 sec
Courtesy the artist
Gaby is our close friend and we also share a studio. The studio is a place where we produce work but it’s also where we produce our friendship, a friendship that is unique in its familial intimacy and its near total lack of boundaries. As artist peers and as friends our relationship is energised by a healthy codependency and our practices, although distinct materially and conceptually, share echoes of our conversations and a world view that we have forged together. Our closeness has given us a privileged insight into each other’s practice. We witness every mundane moment, existential crisis and breakthrough and as we grapple with our work we provide one another with perspective – the essential but easily lost ingredient in any work of art.
Truth and Kinship (2020) is Gaby’s first major production moving image artwork, parts of which, incidentally, were filmed and edited in our studio at a time when three buildings nearby the studio were pulled down and rapidly began metamorphosing into luxury apartment blocks. A process uninterrupted as the whole world shut down in response to COVID-19.
In the making of Truth and Kinship Gaby bravely entered a new territory in their practice, working for the first time with a film crew; cinematographer (Rosie Taylor), audio producer (Milo McKinnon) and actors including themself. This step gave Gaby the creative license to explore in more depth ideas that have taken precedence in their practice. To us the film questions the following: What is the gender and sexuality of gentrification? How is the urban landscape marked by the flow of capital? To us the film feels fictional yet observational, showing how various identities within the structural hierarchy of London co-exist and interact.
Truth and Kinship is narrated by an alien and disembodied voice read by Gaby, their voice distorted to become gender, class and age ambiguous. The voice is both taunting and traumatised, revealing a vast alienation that as viewers but also friends we can’t help but trace back to its origin in Gaby’s consciousness. It’s this alienation that we see in all of Gaby’s work, especially their drawings, where mutant characters in baggy suits with faces blank or hidden by masks languish in the shadows of skyscrapers or under banners bearing the unfulfilled promise of “community”.
Gaby is a person who defies categories. A person joyously and sometimes anxiously adrift; gender, neurologically and physically diverse and until very recently lacking the settled status that would secure their ability to continue living in the post-Brexit UK. In Truth and Kinship Gaby weaponises their alienation like a spell or a curse and gives the city an identity crisis, their voice dominating the sleek, homogenised skyscrapers of London’s financial district, rendered by the camera in Ultra High Definition.
– Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings