The Past That Didn't Occur

In recent years, Mohammed Alsanie has started to share his videos on various social networks. His short scenes are an explicit homage to the popular aesthetics of the 1980s: fluorescent colors assume artificial imagery in a nocturnal atmosphere where neon lights most often generate an all-electronic light. Somewhere between the 1982 sci-fi classic Tron and the 1980s crime series Miami Vice, Alsanie's work is related to retrofuturism, where the future is perceived through filters of the past. Thus, technology already appears obsolete, becoming a vehicle for a certain nostalgia or melancholy.

Alsanie's installation combines different 3D scenes that depict a stroll through the city of Jeddah, which is instantly recognizable due to its urban sculptures, including Mustafa Senbe's Desalination Pipes and Ottmar Hollmann and Salah Abdulkariim's Cosmos (Astronomy). But this drift also takes on a more dreamlike aspect in the image of the character, whose head is eventually replaced by a television. The abstract lines, the horizon, the setting sun, and the meteorites all transport the spectator into a mental universe where they can observe stellar elements on a street corner. Playing with scale encourages visual overflow and a fragmentary approach that tells the story of a dive into the multiverse.