Revisiting Hesitation places the viewer in a trap where a decision is being made and unmade in the consciousness and subconsciousness of a man being prepared for battle. The spectator is locked in a loop, floating over a city whose people cannot bury their beloved. Instead, they rehearse their funerals the night before their departure to battle.

Roy Dib, born in 1983, works and lives in Beirut. On both formal and conceptual levels, artist and filmmaker Roy Dib challenges common notions of space and boundary, weaving together archival material, scripted text and hypothetical circumstances to chronicle the political narratives of our day.

Mark Hachem Gallery – Beirut is delighted to present “The Warriors, The Guardians of the Heritage”, a solo exhibition by Italian artist Antonio Signorini, featuring a selection of his most recent works. Art writer and journalist Anna Seaman writes: “Standing at life size and elevated on plinths, the seven bronze warrior figures ooze dynamism. Their limbs carry movement through their angular forms and although the place where their eyes should be is hollow, their connection with the viewer is certain. The hollowed segments in the eye area are repeated at the hips and on parts of the back. This creates uncertainty as well as balance and movement; it also allows the viewer to experience each piece as a character. Without eyes or complete anatomy, the audience’s mind fills in the missing blanks and the warriors seem vulnerable as well as strong.” Signorini’s warriors are strong, modern and linear. Their clean lines create equilibrium and movement; they are all created in dynamic poses – running, hunting and posturing. Cut segments in the area of the eyes and the back create an angular feeling and missing sections at the hips create abstraction and a beautiful balance between two halves. The spears, bow and arrows have been created using advanced experimental archaeology methods that derive from the same processes used in that period. The artist sourced stone and antique wood from the region and made the objects using our understanding of processes from the past. This collection has been created as a journey of the artist and as a metaphor for human life as a journey in itself. “The precious beauty of the chosen material, the research of symmetries, the creation of perfection in the smooth convexity suggest that the unknown makers were growing a need that was going beyond the simple usefulness of tools. These forms of higher handicraft – evidence that archaic man has migrated from the African plains to the Saudi Arabian desert – might reveal the original nucleus from which art stems. More than any other science, the study of prehistory grants an incredible access to imagination, contrasting with the objectivity of scientific data”, the artist explains. Born in Tuscany in 1971, Antonio Signorini’s journey started with sharing his father’s passion for art. Today, Signorini lives in Dubai where he finds the coexistence of ancient remnants of civilizations and ultra-modern architectural complexes hugely inspirational. Working next to one of the world’s most unique skylines and in a place that is still discovering its own history has given the artist the chance to draw a thread through history, archeology, artistic research and development of art pieces as well as continue to explore the flux between public and private urban spaces

The Lighthouse

Dome of the human relationship with heaven, the disk or the half disk reflecting the light of civilization.

A geometric equation to a doctrine, to a beginning, to a universal question… to  universal beauty, to lines: straight, bent or intersecting… crossing over Earth, disturbing trees and their fruits… the soil and the seasons of nature which merge with the fabric of the human imagination that swings and soars with joy, reverence and aspiration.

You are the epitome of those who seek meaning behind words and speech.

You are the color that cannot be abolished, the sound that never interrupts whispering melodies in the bows of the arches of your minarets and churches, in the links of your keystones to history… in the struggle, in the wars of survival, in the search for truth and freedom.

You are Jerusalem, the embodiment of beauty, the divine city of salvation, the immortal righteous torch.

You are the uncompromising land, the rock that can’t be abolished no matter how long wars are waged.

You are Jerusalem, the city of cultures the torch and the lighthouse of freedom.

You are the manifestation of our traditions, the inspiration to our art and poetry. You are the bearer of our conscience and speech. You are our ultimate prayer.

You are the holiest of the holy, the cross of sacrifice, the church of resurrection ever standing, the way of the cross. You are the persistent and continual sparkle of humanity looking for peace on the altar of forgotten justice.

You are our Jerusalem. To you our humble prayers go every day.

Jamil Molaeb
2018

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz

Letitia Gallery is pleased to announce Eyes Recently Seen, a solo exhibition by Basir Mahmood. Curated by Lauren Wetmore, the show presents new and existing photographic and video works which reveal the distinctive processes by which the artist recreates his own visual experiences. Fascinated by the structures of daily life – labour, hierarchy, distribution and identity – Mahmood’s photographs and videos occupy a space between staged scenes and spontaneous documentation.

In Eyes Recently Seen, works from the past five years of Mahmood’s practice – including meditations on fishermen (Message to the Sea, 2012) and blessed water (Holy water from Mecca, 2015) – are shown together with new pieces that investigate communal human consumption. Taken together, the works demonstrate the artist’s position in relation to the various social structures which they reflect.

For the new works in the exhibition, including Milk (2018) and All Good Things (2018), Mahmood composed the activity of individuals from various occupations, including day-laborers and milk sellers, in a Lahore film studio. The participants were invited to enact their vocations, to explore the nuances of human interaction.

The new diptych, All Divided Equally (2018), continues Mahmood’s fascination with the societal division of resources by depicting an abundance of food, each item cut exactly in half to create a multitude of diptychs. The resulting tableaux considers the outcome of equality in distribution.

NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery presents Ways of Seeing, curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, founders of the multi-disciplinary curatorial platform Art Reoriented, Chairmen of the Montblanc Cultural Foundation, and Affiliate Curators at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The exhibition brings together 26 artists through 41 works spanning a variety of media from painting, sculpture and photography to sound, film and installation. It first opened at ARTER – Space for Art in Istanbul and was later adapted for the Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain in Brussels.

The exhibition includes a number of seminal works that relate, in various ways, to Berger’s multilayered argument. By inviting the viewer to take a second look, upon which the contours of a new reality begin to emerge, they reflect Berger’s call for the viewer to be actively engaged in the act of seeing. A 1968 projection piece by James Turrell, a 1992 vertical construction installation by Fred Sandback, along with a 1966 mirror installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto all blur the boundaries between the artwork and the space in which it is displayed. Video pioneers Paul and Marlene Kos’s 1976 Lightning video, two of Gustav Metzger’s 1996 “Historic Photographs,” and two photographic prints by Lateefa bint Maktoum from 2011 and 2014 respectively, play on the tension between presence and absence, providing the viewer with new ways of accessing the artwork and its corresponding subject matter. Works by Salvador Dali, Alicja Kwade, or Hassan Sharif and Andreas Gursky change our perception of familiar objects by altering their function, display context or physical appearance, making us ponder the way in which narratives are constructed through what we see.

Ways of Seeing will be accompanied by a full program of public events, including talks, workshops, and family-friendly activities.

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.

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.