At birthday and school parties, children play a lot of games that have been inherited down through generations. One of the most popular games is musical chairs, where children compete to grab the last chair, whatever it takes. The end justifies the means! As a consequence, losers get upset, especially if the chairs are forcibly taken.
Kuwaiti artist Suhaila Al-Najdi saw in musical chairs the seed of the obsession of power and clinging to a position. She expressed her thoughts at her recent exhibition "Kursi" (Chair) at Boushahri Gallery.
"The game of musical chairs instills a love of ownership and power - and with time, these people who are glued to their positions will be exhausted. However, they will continue to destroy everyone in their path to remain where they are," said Najdi.
Commonly, artists attempt to creatively present a social or political scene as it is, which is different from Najdi's approach, who allowed herself to dive with her work into an existing and peaceful idea, but imposed a different analysis of its significance, giving it a new meaning. She turned a children's game into a cause for concern in terms of human behavior. "The vivid and bright colors reflect the innocence of the idea at the start. Then the paintings have bleaker colors to reflect the state of those in power and those who are oppressed by them," she explained.
The artist mentioned that when she began to draw the chair, she was thinking about the situation of the Middle Eastern woman, who is bound to sit or stand in a certain position, and if she doesn't comply, she has committed a serious mistake. "After deep thought about the concept of the chair, I found that as the chair has many functions other than sitting, it can have more than a symbolic significance. After a lot of thinking, the idea developed to become even more sophisticated," Najdi said.
At the end of the journey through Najdi's paintings, she told Kuwait Times it is more beneficial to teach our children how to play Japanese musical chairs. In contrast to our popular game that's based on an individual winning it, in Japan, every group has to sit on a chair. The more children sit on a single chair, the better chance they have to win. "Japanese musical chairs promotes teamwork and cooperation for a purpose, and not the chair," she reasoned.
By Athoob Al-Shuaibi