Azza El Siddique's art installations enthrall the senses to capture feelings language can't represent

When you step into one of Azza El Siddique's art installations, it's likely that the first thing you notice will be a scent. It might be sandaliya, a sandalwood oil often used to prepare bodies in Muslim burial practice, or it could be bakhoor, a form of incense made of compressed wood chips soaked in perfumed oils such as myrrh, rose, and frankincense. 

The artist — who was born in Khartoum, Sudan, raised in Vancouver, and currently works between Toronto and New Haven, Connecticut — frequently uses both sandaliya and bakhoor as part of her sculptural environments, which have earned her a shortlist nomination for this year's Sobey Art Award. With a grand prize of $100,000, and $25,000 for each of the shortlisted runners-up, it is Canada's most generous and prestigious contemporary art award. 

"I was actually shocked by it," El Siddique says of her nomination, speaking over Zoom from her studio in New Haven. "I was really happy and grateful. As an emerging installation artist that makes these room-size, large-scale installations that take commitment and work, I rely on institutional support and grants. So I was really happy to have that sort of support behind my practice — really grateful." 

Her installations are ambitious. Each one is a self-contained ecosystem that can involve smell, sound, heat, and light, with lamps, incense smoke, fog machines, and specially engineered water systems. Though she began by studying fashion design at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) before moving into fibre arts at OCAD University and then eventually to a Master's in Fine Arts at Yale, El Siddique's art now incorporates a wide variety of crafts and materials, including metalwork, ceramics, video, and various kinds of technological systems. 

In fashion school, she recalls, "I was essentially getting fabric not to behave like fabric and getting other materials to behave like fabric. I was able to build this sort of lexicon of material knowledge." As a child of immigrant parents, El Siddique also admits that "it never felt feasible to me, at a young age, to see myself as a professional artist. So going into fashion was a way where I felt I could be creative and also have, I thought, a sustainable career. But then I realized, 'No, the whole thing is that I wanted to be an artist.' And so that's when I pivoted and went to OCAD and found myself in fibres. And then I just had a really interesting journey to where I am today."

Recently, El Siddique's signature approach has involved quasi-architectural steel structures that function as displays for sculptures made of glass, unfired clay, or sculpted incense — pots, vessels, and figures — usually along with environmental water and heat systems that cause the materials to break down and transform over the course of the exhibition, leaving residues of rust, dust, mud, and smoke. The forms of both the metal structures and the sculptural objects are drawn from El Siddique's research into the ancient history of present-day Sudan: Egyptian and Nubian mythology and culture, including temples, burial rites, and artifacts.

"All the things I'm interested in," El Siddique says, "entropy, scent, ritual, science, politics, mythology — they all intertwine in the practices of ancient Nubian and Egyptian cultures."

Written and oral language didn't have enough for me. When I'm creating, I'm also trying to represent all these feelings that I don't have language for.- Azza El Siddique

Standing inside of these environments can feel almost like being in an alien museum, in which ancient and futuristic elements combine in ritual assemblages with an unknown function. Rather than preserve and conserve, El Siddique's artworks unmake their own contents: they are ruins in process. Thematically, they are about how time and memory manifest in physical materials and processes. They deal with decay and entropy, transformation and rebirth, history and commemoration. But El Siddique's fascination with the culture of her ancient ancestors is also an oblique way of exploring whose histories are remembered, and how.

"It's really about power," she tells me. "I remember being young and realizing how unfair the world is, especially to minorities. And also questioning religion, growing up in a Muslim household that was quite liberal, but realizing at a really young age that I personally didn't need organized religion in order to be a good human being, seeing that as also a form of power and control."

She explains how her thinking about the relation between mortality, power, and politics coalesced in a university class she took on the ancient Egyptian afterlife, in which so much of a well-documented and sophisticated social order was based on preparations for death. She wondered about what this history could tell us now: "We do need order, you know? We do need rituals in order to mourn." 

Though El Siddique's interest in mortality and memorialization is longstanding, it entered into her work in a more personal way after the tragic and untimely death of her brother Teto, a promising artist who preceded Azza at Yale (where he graduated in 2016) and was an honourable mention for the RBC Painting Competition in 2017, shortly before his passing. In 2021, Azza El Siddique mounted an exhibition at Towards Gallery in Toronto titled fire is love, water is sorrow in which her steel armatures became display structures for her brothers' paintings, accompanied by welded metal drawings and CGI video that used machine learning to fabricate new works based on Teto's existing art and archives. 

"For me," Azza explains, "it was like taking a close read into his work. And it was interesting because, although my brother and I are both artists, we never really talked about our own work to each other in the way we talked about life and so on — we never really talked that much about art." And yet, it was her brothers' example that encouraged her to pursue her education at Yale.

"I was inspired to go to Yale after seeing how much [my brother's] work evolved while he was there, and I really wanted that for my work as well. It also scared me a little bit, and I always feel like you should do what scares you."

When we spoke, El Siddique was in the midst of planning an exhibition for the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a body of work based on her ongoing research into scent. To prepare, she participated in a residency through Amant, in New York, and apprenticed with a Sudanese perfumer in Maryland. The steel-framework architectural space for this show is based on the birth-house temple of Dedwen (or Dedun), the ancient Egyptian and Nubian god of incense. El Siddique also created bakhoor scent sculptures cast as water lilies, along with CGI videos involving 3D scans of the materials from the bakhoor recipes.

While all of these works are research-intensive, El Siddique's practice is not meant to impart information, but to enthrall the senses. "I've always been a visual learner," she explains. "Written and oral language didn't have enough for me. I think that when I'm creating, I'm also trying to represent all these feelings that I don't have language for. Through fragmenting things, I can begin to understand."

The work of the five artists shortlisted for this year's Sobey Art Award will be on view in a special 2022 Sobey Art Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada starting October 28, 2022 and running until March 2023.