Past Disquiet is a documentary and archival exhibition centered on research conducted into and around the story of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which opened in the spring of 1978 at the Beirut Arab University. The size and scope of the exhibition were unprecedented for the region, and yet it seems to have eclipsed from art historical narratives and texts. The investigation led to other marginal histories of “museums-in-exile,” contemporary to the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, such as the Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende, Art Contre/Against Apartheid, and Art pour le peuple du Nicaragua . The reconstructed story of the exhibition has traced complex and sometimes intersecting networks, as well as a rarely explored history of politically engaged artists mobilized in different modes around the seminal causes inscribed in the tri-continental international anti-imperialist solidarity movement of the 1970s, such as the opposition to against the Vietnam War, the rejection of the Pinochet dictatorship, the Apartheid regime in South Africa, and in support of the Palestinian struggle.

Past Disquiet displays, mediates, and incarnates themes and questions that have guided the curators’ research, using montaged video of archival material and film as well as contemporary interviews and writing, in addition to reproductions of documents. It maps constellations of artists and collectives bound by political affiliations and solidarities, beginning with solidarity with Palestine and expanding to the rest of the world.

The first version of the exhibition was produced by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2015, and the second version by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin in 2016. The third Spanish-language version was produced by the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), and presented in the spring of this year. This present edition was coproduced by the Sursock Museum and Lucid, and with support from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC).

Research for Past Disquiet was made possible thanks to the support of Rana Sadik and Samer Younis, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), ZedGrant, the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA), Tensta Konsthall, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej Warszawie, tranzit (Budapest), and the Institut national de l’histoire de l’art.

All editions of Past Disquiet have been designed by Studio Safar, and video documents have been conceived with Vartan Avakian and Mohanad Yaqubi.

slow light, a solo show by painter daniele genadry, is devoted to her concern in light movements and the animation of sight. addressing the interrelation between distance, movement, and perception of light, genadry’s work opens a reflection on the limits of seeing through the process of image-making. the various images – traces of memories or remnants of found photographs or photographs taken by the artist – are introduced at different “levels” of perception, through multiple surfaces that range from large-scale paintings and intricate hand drawings, to screen prints and light-based objects.

often drawing from landscape imagery, the works aim to reveal light as both a material and a saturating force, as both a conveyor of visibility and as a blinder. genadry’s paintings somehow relocate photography to its earliest stages, by capturing light at a wide range of speeds. this capture of light is achieved through the negation, blurring, disappearance, and unstable recognition of the painted world.

the spatial installation of the works in slow light provides the necessary conditions for a slow sight and prepares the viewer to experience the different velocities of perception when confronted with the painted surfaces. the palette – a paired down, fluorescent-washed, almost monochromatic range of colors – emphasizes both an excessively saturated and desaturated surface. the acclimatization of sight and the progressive deciphering of the painted surface turns the inability to know what is being seen into a cognitive and perceptive experience of light itself.

This exhibition reflects upon the notion of “Togetherness”.

Trees, people, nature… we all live in an interconnected universe.
Karine Boulanger’s depiction of the “forest”, ravaged by blazing fires, can but call our attention to the fragility of this equilibrium, between man and nature. Daoud’s present us with an expressive celebration of the forces of nature, while Bassam Geitani’s painting call for a more contemplative pondering, through his use delicate tones and light, forcing time and our reading to slow down. Mansour El Habre pieces are fast depicting of fleeting moments of groups in different situations, where, the only thing that is left is the artist’s rendering of these fleeting moments…

Collective exhibition:

Title: Collective 2018

Date: July 13 until August 14, 2018.

Artists: Karine Boulanger ,David Daoud, Mansour El Habre, Bassam Geitani.

Attached you will find the images and a text.

Opening hours:

July:

Tuesday until Friday from 10:00 am till 6:00 pm

Saturdays from 10:00 am till 2:00 pm

Closed Sunday and Monday

August:

Tuesday until Friday from 10:00 am till 3:00 pm

Closed Saturday , Sunday and Monday.

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time…

My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention…

My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.

Wisława Szymborska

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home, presented at OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin, aims to unveil the artistic practice of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian by focusing on their methodology, communication, and construction of their works. Over the past few decades, Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam have shared a life philosophy that has allowed for mutual creation, during which their individual practices interact with their collaborative ones and which is informed by the understanding and technical skills of other people. From the dialogues they build among themselves and with other artists, friends, and collaborators – including stage director Joan Baixas, robotic engineer John Cole, community artist Niyaz Azadikhah, film producer Mandana Mohit, and writer Nazli Ghassemi – these artists have established a personal language that has enabled them to present different layers of content and texture in their work.

Thus, a main element of their practice is human labour, including theirs, as well as a working process that involves the inclusion of different opinions, discussing and considering opposing perspectives and approaches, and mainly, experimenting with a wide range of possibilities. Drawing on the American philosopher Dan Dennett’s approach to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which is based on the notion of reverse engineering and processes of research and development, one might see the collaborative practice of these artists as a repetitive process in which every act represents another step in maturity. In other words, every new achievement – but also every new failure – that has been put forth by them or by their collaborators contributes to the latest interpretation of a work, a performance, an installation, or the presentation of an exhibition.

The current exhibition does not seek to be a retrospective or a survey of the artists’ oeuvre, but rather a demonstration of how they embrace their practice and heterogeneous sense of creation. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home is an attempt to show the work of Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam from a perspective that observes the mechanisms through which their collaborative practice is conveyed but also how it is formed during a creative process that exalts a working philosophy based on a shared reality and the inclusion of others.

The above, are excerpts, from the exhibition text written by Abaseh Mirvali and Constanza Medina.

Supported by Fondazione CRT, with the generous contribution of Alserkal Avenue, Artissima, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. In collaboration with Teatro Regio di Torino.

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition by the renowned Palestinian artist Samir Salameh (b.1944). Curated by Khaled Hourani, the exhibition includes various artworks that reflect the experience of the artist over the past years since he held his first exhibition Dera’a, Syria in 1963. Salameh has a rich experience that contributed to plastic arts in Palestine and abroad. His style is dominated by his own language and methods in painting and coloring which he carefully developed with time while learning from his domestic heritage and opening himself to the world with its cultural diversity. Throughout his artistic path, Salameh presented more than seventy solo and group exhibitions hosted in Arab and foreign capitals. His artworks varied between realistic and lyrical abstraction, with the use of Arabic calligraphy and oriental themes. His works also included calligraphy, watercolour painting, prints and others.

Letitia Gallery is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by the British artist Nathaniel Rackowe, which takes the city of Beirut as a point of departure in order to investigate the ever-changing nature of cites, and their continual destruction and renewal.

The Shape of a City uses industrial materials such as corrugated roofing, galvanised steel and cement blocks, and combines them with artificial light; used to soften the hard edges of the mass produced materials, allowing Rackowe to explore the ways in which urban dwellers must continually adapt their behaviour in order to successfully negotiate the built landscape.

Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture presents Rhythms of a Different Time, Toufic Abdul-Al’s first retrospective in Beirut.

Born in Acre in 1938, Toufic Abdul-Al belongs to the first generation of modern Palestinian artists. His works are distinguished through his visual culture and freedom of expression.

The exhibition aims to present a new narrative in the works of this unique artist through showcasing the core of his art and connect it to its origin, through a collection of video installations that feature his relatives and friends and his muse and source of dreams, his ancient city, Acre.

Kevork Mourad was born in Qamishli, a town in northeastern Syria. Of Armenian heritage, he received his Master of Fine Arts from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts in Armenia, and now lives and works in New York. With his technique of spontaneous painting, where he shares the stage with musicians—a collaboration in which art and music develop in counterpoint to each other—he has worked with many world-renowned musicians, including Kinan Azmeh, Brooklyn Rider, Ken Ueno, Liubo Borissov, and Issam Rafea.
Mourad is a member, as a visual artist, of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. He has performed, among others, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard University, the Morgenland Festival, Le Festival du Monde Arabe in Montreal, the Nara Museum in Japan, Lincoln Center Atrium, the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park’s Summerstage, the Agha Khan Museum in Toronto, and the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg.

Ayyam Gallery Beirut is pleased to invite you to the opening of Thresholds 3.0, the solo exhibition of painter Mouteea Murad, on Thursday, 7 June at 5.00 pm.

The third presentation of Mouteea Murad’s latest body of work, Thresholds 3.0, highlights a selection of paintings from the artist’s 2016 solo exhibition Thresholds presented at Ayyam Gallery Dubai. In this series Murad experiments with the use of mathematics in geometric abstraction, an approach to non-objective art that he developed over the course of a decade. Presenting a select number of large-scale paintings in a different setting allows the viewer to furtherexplore Murad’s emphasis on space and dimension, which he masters by both drawing on the formalism of Op art and using the Fibonacci number sequence as a starting point for his compositions. The artist’s use of the numerical sequence and mathematical functions results in an impression of motion and the illusion of expanding space within the works. His grid-like patterns partially conceal the interactions of the polygons and lines of the layer below them, creating an illusion of depth. As the distances between the grid lines change, the paintings appear to swell and contract in front of the viewer.

Murad continues to draw inspiration from Islamic art while employing forms and lines largely defined by algebraic functions, allowing for his work to see a unification of spirituality and formalism.

Combining large-scale clay reliefs & drawings Monika Grabuschnigg’s first solo exhibition, “What satisfaction could you possibly have”, explores the dislocated intimacies & disembodied desires of humans living in highly digitized societies.How we search for & connect with others, how we long for, flirt & fantasize together is changing dramatically. The apps & websites we turn to seem to offer direct portals to other lives – immediate & intimate interactions that can lead to in-the-flesh satisfactions. But there is no unmediated exchange: we are subject to, and encouraged to enact, self-censorship, self-exploitation. Our loves and loneliness mined for profit. Each of us put to work as blister-thumbed miner.

Both the reliefs & drawings in the show reference the ever-present screens through which this happens. We see fractured & repaired bodies morphing into one another; cropped & cracked identities exaggerated & engorged by algorithmic bias; character-limited emotions congealing into searching limbs, messy embraces, visceral gazes.Materially vulnerable, tonally fleshy, the inch-thick, flat-to-the-wall reliefs feel like substantial moments captured through a haze of distortion: the analog & digital worlds clashing head-on. The forms in the drawings are more of-this-worldly, but more deeply mired in dream-states. Created after (rather than as sketches for) the reliefs they feel like moments of surveillance: evidence gathered from tapping the data flows between the babbling ceramic.

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is proud to bring to Beirut FRAGMENTS, a solo show by RAYYANE TABET. The exhibition opens on April 26th, 2018, 7 – 9 PM.

We will also be hosting on Saturday, April 28th from 11:00 AM a reading by the artist, a roundtable conversation with Kim Benzel & Clare Davies, curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Bettina Steinbrügge, director of Kunstverein in Hamburg. Kaph books will be launching FRAGMENTS / BRUCHSTÜCKE published in collaboration with Kunstverein, Hamburg, and DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program.

Rayyane Tabet exhibited with us for the first time in 2006 as part of the the group show Moving Homes. He had his first solo at the gallery in Beirut in 2013: The Shortest Distance Between Two Points, followed by Only Gods Never Die at the gallery in Hamburg in 2015.

FRAGMENTS explores an archeological dig led by Max von Oppenheim, a German diplomat and ancient historian, in Tell Halaf, Northeast Syria, at the turn of the 20th century. The project stemmed from a performance presented at the 2016 Marrakech Biennale, and evolved through a residency at the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Program, and a show at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. The completed project was presented in Tabet’s first major institutional solo at the Kunstverein in Hamburg in November 2017.

Source: Sfeir-Semler Gallery