Moosa Silwadi’s artistic creations strike the viewer with their energy and explosive dynamism. At times they remind of the whirr of objects moving at high speed, knotted buildings or futuristic cityscapes, at times they could be close-ups of the human anatomy, muscles or other organic forms. Executed in a rhythmic and fluid style, Moosa Silwadi’s works are creations of compulsion and obsession.

A Bahraini architect and artist, Moosa Silwadi was born in 1968 in Bahrain to an exiled professional family from West Bank – Jerusalem. After completing his schooling in Bahrain, Moosa studied architecture in Jordan. Through the course of his career, he has worked as an interior designer, exhibition designer and architect, all of which enriched his practical experience and artistic perception. Since 2004, Moosa Silwadi has been exploring his ideas in a purely artistic manner in order to escape the constraints on creativity imposed in his everyday and professional life. Inspired by a billboard advertisement featuring a rope made into a knot, the artist continued to use this image as a metaphor for the human condition, interpersonal interactions and extended it to the field of architecture. The resulting concept “knot construction” has preoccupied Moosa Silwadi’s thinking ever since. First explored in the design for buildings, sketches and drawings of knots in all their possible forms soon followed.

Silwadi’s first exhibition, titled “Infinite Lines,” was held in 2008 at the Maison Jamsheer. Consisting of sketches of traditional and futuristic buildings on tissue paper, it also gave the public a first glimpse of Moosa Silwadi’s knot constructions in the form of computer generated architectural drawings of knot-shaped architectural forms. In the current exhibition at the Bin Matar House, the artist has taken his artistic work a step further by exploring the concept more fully and taking it into an abstract and purely aesthetic sphere.

Ranging from intimately-sized to larger scale works, from works on paper to models in aluminum sheet, metal mesh and plastic pipes, in the exhibition “Knot Construction” Moosa Silwadi freely explores the possibilities inherent in the knot. The artist divides his creations into generative, biomorphic, organic and energetic forms.

Moosa Silwadi explains these different forms as follows: “My generative art is created by hand but automatically driven by my feelings, visualization and natural morphosis with the outcome being an overlapping of perspectives. I try not to interfere with the drawing however, this can be a battle at times and this in itself is the challenge. It is akin to an endless game between me, the lines and the resulting outcome. From my generative art I developed my lines to more organic forms so that the result can be seen in an abstract way as leaves and stems, or the movement of stroking fingers on a guitar. These forms have a certain strength and rhythm. Stems took me again to knots and then ropes….. it is all related. The pipe models are part of this thought process. These convoluted forms then took me to the exploration of the human body being the biomorphic part of the exhibition. I have found endless fascination in the possibilities of the twisted form and this image was further developed after I considered the plight of the Abu Ghareeb prisoners. Since then I started to see human bodies as complex knots and both my aluminum models and drawings are a reflection of that relationship. My visualization of the human body is like a convoluted complex knotted form fighting against itself in a perpetual storm. This was further inspired by a favourite poem by Mahmood Darwish when he speaks of people under occupation having turbulent rivers and storms under their skin. Finally the energetic… this collection is an enlargement of my smaller drawings. These large pieces are the exploration of the eye as a tool… a zoom lens captivating the small, intricate parts of a drawing. This process is again based on rhythm which eases the artistic process for me as I have found the production of these pieces mentally and physically draining. Once I have found the rhythm at the beginning of each piece I am able to complete the work in an almost meditative state.”

The current exhibition will showcase over 60 of the artist’s drawings, together with aluminum and plastic pipe models, wire mesh sculptures and paper origami constructions. Together, they explore the artist’s world of imagination at a crossroads with the world of architecture.