Artist, curator and researcher Ala Younis investigates the complex narratives of the modern Arab world, often engaging with overlooked histories to reassemble them through everyday gestures and collective memories. Tin Soldiers (2011) is a three-dimensional representation of nine standing armies involved in wars that have shaped today’s ‘Middle East’. At a 1:200 scale, each of the 12,261 metal soldiers bears a hand-painted flag that represents a country; here Younis has employed the tin soldiers to reflect not only the size of standing armies but also the many ‘incidental soldiers’ who trained but never reached the battlefield, those who were born into a period of war but came of age in times of peace. Highlighting the material and immaterial, physical and emotional, embodied and expressed notions of occupation, Tin Soldiers reflects on the relationship between militarisation and emancipatory struggle—both in the form of a monolithic block and a composite composition.

^{*Currently exhibited at NYUAD}