Artforums’ Under The Cover: Nida Sinnokrot

Nida Sinnokrot, Ka (Oslo), 2017. Photo by Ziad Trad. Courtesy the artist.
Nida Sinnokrot, Ka (Oslo), 2017. Photo by Ziad Trad. Courtesy the artist.

ACT Professor Nida Sinnokrot’s KA (Oslo) (2017) graces the cover of Artforum’s summer 2021 issue.

In their monthly web series, “Under the Cover,” Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco talks with Sinnokrot about creating the work KA (Oslo) (2017), which is currently on view at the Palestinian Museum.

Sinnokrot begins by saying that “hacking technologies and infrastructures of control that give rise to the social, political, environmental instabilities has always been a driving force in my practice.”

 

“[KA] is an ancient Egyptian concept and it’s represented by these two arms joined at the shoulder, with or without a head. And the interpretations range from “the life force of all things,” to a code of conduct, the powerful and those who submit to power, to ideas of return or departure, the creative and destructive act. I’ve read things about it being like a womb. So it has a lot of different resonances.”

Nida Sinnokrot, Ka (JCB,JCB), 2009. 2 JCB 1CX backhoe arms. Commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 9.

“We have to come up with new ways of telling stories, new narrative structures, new tools and implements that challenge those standards and weights and measures of time and space that are so deeply rooted in these kind of Abrahamic notions of good and evil, exile and return, these binaries. But somehow I think they’re embodied in that reflections between these two arms. And so somewhere in between them, perhaps we have to find and embrace this ambiguity, and come up with new ways of telling stories, new ways of building potential futures.”

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