Opening reception: Thursday 8 March from 18:00 to 21:00

The Story of the Rubber Tree is an ongoing project that examines the histories of Beirut’s abandoned houses, frequently re-inhabited and invaded by rubber trees. Once planted to provide shade in urban gardens, rubber trees now grow wild in the absence of people to manage them, undermining the foundations of the houses they occupy. Abed Al Kadiri’s new painting, sculpture, and video works trace the complex familial narratives and memories embedded in such spaces, taking the tree as witness to their histories.

Consciously unfolding as chapters in a narrative, Al Kadiri reflects on the social, economic, and physical transformations that Beirut has undergone in the last century, through the prism of a single family’s home.

The Blacksmith and the Rubber Tree (2017-18), is a triptych of large-scale paintings that interweave moments of utopia, labor, and isolation. The structure of the storybook is the architecture for intermittent interaction between the blacksmith, his house, and the rubber tree in his garden. Though Al Kadiri works predominantly in painting, his use of pencil and graphite reflects the provisional nature of such stories, and the suspension of time.

The installation, In Dreams: Branch is the Brother (2017-18), comprises of a sculpture cast in bronze, directly from the fragments of five rubber trees gathered from five different houses across Beirut. The rubber chair is a replica of the original metal chair found in the blacksmith’s house. The work reflects on the branch and the tree as symbols for the familial, connection, and the personal; their material mirrors the work of the blacksmith himself.

Al Kadiri’s broader practice examines thematics of violence, cultural heritage, migration, and belonging; The Story of the Rubber Tree explores the changes wrought on Beirut’s urban and personal fabrics, and the tree’s ability to address intimate shared histories.

Source: sursock.museum

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, DUBAI – The Jean-Paul Najar Foundation (JPNF) is proud to
present Jene Highstein: Space and Place a solo exhibition showcasing the artist’s seminal sculptures as well as works on paper from the 1970s through the 1990s.

A key figure of sculptural abstraction, Highstein used bronze, concrete, steel and wood to create primal and organic forms. His quasi-manufactured sculptures create a dialogue between raw materials and biomorphism, stressing the importance of the object’s presence within a surrounding space and its impact on the viewer. The solidity of Highstein’s sculptures complement the delicacy of his works on paper. His drawings of intense bone black pigment and Chinese ink function as maquettes for the sculptural forms and clearly map the evolution of his sculptural abstraction.

Source: jpnajarfoundation.com

Featured image: Four Forged Steel, St Etienne 1978, Deutsch Foundation, Lausanne. Photo Magali Prod’Hom.

Louvre Abu Dhabi explores humanity’s quest to understand and represent the world in its second special exhibition, opening 23 March

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 12 March 2018 – Globes: Visions of the World curated by Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) will open to the public on 23 March and run until 2 June 2018. Louvre Abu Dhabi’s second special exhibition will explore the history of the spherical representation of the world and its scientific instruments from antiquity to the present day. A hundred and sixty works from the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and outstanding loaned works will be on display.

More than 40 globes and spheres, rare archaeological remains, magnificent scripts, astrolabes and splendid world maps will immerse visitors in the 2500 years’ history of representing the world. The exhibition is curated by Catherine Hofmann, Chief Curator at Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), and François Nawrocki, Chief Curator and Deputy Director at Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris.

The exhibition’s innovative scenography designed by Laurence Fontaine in spherical shapes guides the visitors into a chronological tour from Antiquity to the present day. Starting with the display of Vincenzo Coronelli’s majestic globes and Jérôme Martinot’s armillary sphere, the artists Jean-Luc and Patricia Boivineau have created an artistic vision of the stars and constellations which can be seen in Abu Dhabi’s sky during the winter season.

Source: louvreabudhabi.ae

Featured image: Celestial sphere, c. 200 BCE , Engraved silver, Paris, Collection privée Kugel © Paris, Collection privée Kugel

Gravity is what attracts Amal’s characters to their universe. Her silhouettes of women are bolder and larger than in her earlier paintings. Her strokes are soft in places and thick and defiant in others. Her colors are pale and serene with vibrant strong layers. Her characters are still women looking into the future, but now interacting with their environment. We see them as part of an interactive society, present and moving forward.

Amal Al Aathem speaks for women. Through the subtle messages in her paintings you can trace the development of women’s role and their place in a fast changing environment and a global universe.

The paintings in ‘Gravity’ are challenging, colorful and proud.

The exhibition will be on display until 30th June 2018.

Source: animagallery.com

Featured image: Amal Al Aathem, Universe 1, 2018, Mixed Media, 200 x 180 cm.

Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture presents Sci-Fi Trilogy, an exhibition by Larissa Sansour. The exhibition brings together three of Sansour’s films – A Space Exodus(2009), Nation Estate (2012) and In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016). Under the common themes of loss, belonging, heritage and national identity, the films explore aspects of the social and political turmoil of the Middle East. While A Space Exodus envisions the final uprootedness of the Palestinian experience and takes the current political predicament to its extra-terrestrial extreme by landing the first Palestinian on the moon, Nation Estate reveals a sinister account of an entire population restricted to a single skyscraper. In the trilogy’s final instalment, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, a narrative resistance leader engages in archaeological warfare in a desperate attempt to secure the future of her people. Using the language of sci-fi and glossy production, Sansour’s trilogy presents a dystopian vision of a Middle East on the brink of the apocalypse. The three films are shown alongside related installations, sculptural and photographic works.

In his older works, Kais Salman utilises satire to subvert the normalisation of greed, vanity, and ideological extremism that is rapidly defining our era. Seeking to confront and exorcise sociocultural manifestations of such depravity, Salman taps into ugliness and abjection through intentionally hyperbolised imagery accentuated by punches of colour and aestheticised forms. In his latest series, the artist takes these forms and explores their abstraction, in search of new compositions.

Through the creation of these worlds, Salman aims to blur the line between our personal realities and those imposed on us by varying media channels. The artist does not attempt to recreate specific situations, but rather create new spaces in which the figures in his works come from an exploration of his own imagination. The paintings take the viewer through the many layers of human emotion, ranging from laughter and joy to fear, anger, and existentialism. The artist proposes abstract ideas and the possibility of new potential realities.

Featured Image: Untitled, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 190 x 190 cm

Michael Halak was born in Fassuta village, Galilee (1975). He graduated with M.F.A in Fine Art from Haifa University (2009). Halak is a realistic painter whose works focus on classical subjects such as portraits, landscapes and still-lifes with a contemporary twist. He has had solo shows at Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Noga Gallery in Tel-Aviv and Haifa University Art Gallery. He also exhibited in a number of group shows such as Haifa Museum, Herzelia Museum and other galleries in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Halak won several awards including: Israeli Ministry of Culture and sports for contemporary artist (2010) and (2015), The Young Artist Rappaport prize (2011), and the Pais Culture Council support in Exhibition (2012 – 2016).

Halak’s works belong to the Western tradition of realist; illusory painting that goes back hundreds of years. The drama and turmoil in his works are given contemporary expression and reflect his connection to this particular place and time. Halak addresses the immediate reality that surrounds him by means of direct observation or photographs. The illusion of reality represented is seductively beautiful and perfect, yet it is simultaneously revealed to carry a disturbing charge, which is related to states of disruption and disintegration.

His works charged with the central tension that shapes both his life and his work; the question of the connection between man and place, and related concerns regarding presence and absence, identification and dis-identification, witnessing and silencing, memory and intentionally imposed oblivion.

Participating artists:

Adam Shehada, Ahed Izhiman, Benji Boyadgian, Dina Mattar, Fayez Sirsawi, Fouad Agbaria, Hosni Radwan, Ibrahim Nubani, Issam Bader, Khaled Hourani, Michael Halak, Mohammad Joulani, Nabil Anani, Osama Said, Rana Samara, Rawan Khalilieh, Rehab Nazzal, Sliman Mansour, Tayseer Barakat, Varvara Razak and Yazan Khalili.

At once familiar and alien, landscapes are at the core of Aghbashian’s work. They seem to have been the theater of chaotic events left in a state of disturbing yet peaceful silence. An uncanny feeling is felt as one identifies with these anthropomorphic landscapes that speak of a fantasy place. In her paintings, flat parts of the landscapes or ‘cut-outs’ allude to kids’ pop-up books, reminiscent of Aghbashian’s childhood, and turn the two-dimensional surface into a skillfully layered one, populated by sculptural ruins. These images seem suspended in an in-between state, frozen after the occurrence of otherworldly phenomena, all the while propelling the viewer in a surrealist, sometimes futuristic dimension devoid of human life, as life itself has come to inhabit and animate the eerie landscapes. Time is not represented, it is perceived, as Aghbashian blurs all boundaries. She delves to understand the overlap and intersection of different narratives and explores the ambiguities of our times. As she builds up her paintings in layers and sands them back down, some remain transparent, others become dense, some blur, expand and shrink, get wiped, ever evolving and coexisting.

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

Elmarsa Tunis is pleased to present Entre fractus et gestalt, a solo exhibition by Samir Triki, a major Tunisian abstract painter from April 28 to May 26, 2018 at their gallery space in Tunis.

Samir Triki’s practice draws on abstract painting built on a geometrical expression or Euclidean geometry that examines the material aspects manifesting themselves in graphics and visual expressions, such as the principle of symmetry or inversion of the figure and ground. In his recent paintings occur intuitive deviations to fractal content based on the fragmentation or fractus expressed by differences in scale such as enlargement and reduction, similarity and resemblance. In his quest of intelligible formal expression, Triki adopts characteristics pertaining to the psychology of the form and organized whole or more specifically gestaltism.

Featured image: Samir Triki, Irradiation, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 140×100 cm

vito acconci · richard artschwager · nairy baghramian · janette laverrière · marcel broodthaers · william s. burroughs · guy de cointet · robert wilhite · claude closky · baris dogrusöz · gheith al amine · jean-pascal flavien · david hammons · iman issa · nesrine khodr · ali meer · pallavi paul · ieva saudargaité · natascha sadr haghighian · nicholas bussmann · roy samaha

This exhibition introduces four influential figures of the 20th century, each of whom has initiated a very specific relationship between language and space, be it through transformation of poetry, performances, ready-mades, sculptures and installations, or politics of the body. marcel broodthaers, guy de cointet and richard artschwager are shown for the first time in lebanon and the region. together with vito acconci, their individual practices acknowledge the processes that have embedded language into visual art, through the materiality of printed text, verbal protocols and the way the tongue constantly migrates in and out the body. the old testament of david hammons, in which he impiously transforms marcel duchamp’s catalogue into everlasting data, echoes duchamp’s legacy as fundamental to the relationship between language and visual art.

space edits is curated by marie muracciole.

Saleh Barakat Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Hiba Kalache, Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite, curated by Natasha Gasparian. Hiba Kalache presents works on paper, paintings, a connective body of sculptures, and an installation. She draws in her painting and she writes with her brush. Her gestures are vigorous yet intricate, scribbly à la Twombly. Her practice is one of écriture. To use Roland Barthes’ now-old French neologism, her painting is scriptible: its hermeneutic, symbolic, historic, and semic codes open up to an indeterminacy in the reading of both her work and its own textual references. Grand in scale, layered and ambiguous, it does not reaffirm what is mythologized. There is no singular unity in its composition, no universe that is total or whole. Kalache’s work demands a reception that is both distant and intimate, and in return, it promises jouissance akin, and yet antithetical to divine rapture.

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.