Nottingham Contemporary

Rana Hamadeh presents The Fugitive Image, the latest chapter of her long-term project Alien Encounters, for this, her first solo exhibition in the UK. The original impetus for her Alien Encounters series was Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place. Her sculptural installations, exhibitions, and lecture-performances explore the idea of being alien as a way to address urgent issues in the Arab and wider world today. Hamadeh revisits the story of the infamous serial killer sisters Raya and Sakina, the first women to be sentenced to death by a legal court in the modern history of Egypt.

This exhibition was part of Alien Encounters – four solo exhibitions, each featuring new commissions. The four artists use performance, theatre and film. For them, fiction and alternative realities become ways of transforming and extending our understanding of identity, social norms and world history.

The idea for the season developed out of conversations with Collabor-8 Collective, Nottingham Contemporary’s young people’s group, and was curated to coincide with Circuit, our arts festival for 15 to 25 years olds in Nov.