Geological Encounters : By Ammar Khammash

Reflects the philosophy-in-practice of Jordanian artist and architect Ammar Khammash. Working across disciplines, Khammash engages directly with the terrains of Jordan, responding to their geological, social, and cultural conditions.

Central to his practice is the act of encounter. Through observation, documentation, and intervention, Khammash responds to the discoveries that emerge from his movement across the landscape. His work attends to the complex layers embedded within the geological; that is the economic, social, biological, and archaeological, revealing a multivalent approach that understands the land as a living system shaped by many actors.

At any site, Khammash listens before he creates. His works develop through a sustained dialogue with place, reflecting both a deep sensitivity to context and an attentiveness to process that is evident in his final forms.

Khammash’s terracotta creatures in this exhibition emerge from exactly such a conversation. They respond not only to the materiality of clay, but also to its extraction and transformation within contemporary systems of production and consumption. Drawing from the process of mass-produced planters found along roadsides across Jordan, Khammash intervenes in both form and process. Through this engagement, he creates hybrid objects, part vessel, part organism that appear to have metamorphosed from within the very conditions of their making.