Agenda

Louvre Abu Dhabi opens its third season with Abstraction and Calligraphy – Towards a Universal Language (17 February – 12 June 2021). In keeping with the third season’s theme of exchanges between East and West, this international exhibition marks the second major collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and is sponsored by Montblanc, a Maison whose innovative craftsmanship continues to influence the culture of writing. Charting sites of mutual inspiration around the world, and dedicated to artistic practices of abstraction, the show explores how 20th century artists established a new visual language by merging text and image, inspired by the earliest forms of mark-making and, particularly, calligraphy. The exhibition brings together 101 masterworks on loan from 16 partner institution collections, alongside seven works from Louvre Abu Dhabi’s permanent collection, and two monumental artworks by contemporary artists whose current-day practices bring recurring themes of the exhibition to life.

Organised in four themed sections, the exhibition will investigate the timeline of abstraction as a new visual language established by artists in the early 20th century. By highlighting the rich cultural exchange taking place at that time, visitors will discover how the abstract movements were inspired by a plethora of signs and symbols, philosophies, and artistic techniques from cultures and societies far from European and American capitals. Artists including Paul Klee, André Masson, Vassily Kandinsky, Cy Twombly, Lee Krasner, and Jackson Pollock sought a new universal language that enabled them to express their emotions in response to a rapidly changing society, breaking away from figurative conventions. The show will also focus on how these same influences informed the practices of artists from the region – from Dia Azzawi and Anwar Jalal Shemza, to Ghada Amer, Shirazeh Houshiary, and Mona Hatoum. The exhibition will be completed with installations from two contemporary artists, eL Seed and Sanki King, exploring how artists today are still seeking new visual forms to respond to current societal changes.

In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and France Muséums, Abstraction and Calligraphy – Towards a Universal Language is curated by Didier Ottinger, Deputy Director, Cultural Programming, MNAM-CCI, assisted by Marie Sarré, Associate Curator, Modern Collections Department, MNAM-CCI. Works on loan will come from Centre Pompidou in Paris, Musée du Louvre in Paris, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, Administration Jean Matisse, Paris, Galerie Jacques Bailly in Paris, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger, Paris, Musée municipal de St Germain Laval, Musée des beaux-arts de Grenoble, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York, Galerie Michael Werner, Märkisch Wilmersdorf, Trebbin, The McKee Gallery, New York, Mona Hatoum Studio, London, noirmontartproduction, Paris and eL Seed Studio, Dubai. Also included will be works from Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

“It is with pride and great excitement that we welcome the opening of the first Louvre Abu Dhabi international exhibition of 2021, especially as masterworks from so many illustrious lending partners will be on show here at Louvre Abu Dhabi, and in the region, for the very first time,” remarked HE Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, Chairman of the Department of Culture and Tourism-Abu Dhabi. “Museums, with their ability to inspire curiosity, discovery and learning, are essential to every society, and we hold them in particular regard here in Abu Dhabi. It has become more apparent than ever the increasingly important role that art and culture play in our lives, providing wonder, intellectual stimulation and comfort, as well as a sense of connection to others in our communities and far beyond. What is also clear, and what was a primary message of the Reframing Museums symposium in November, is that trust and solidarity between countries and between arts institutions are what will ensure a vibrant future for a collaborative, international cultural sector.”

Manuel Rabaté, Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, commented, “We are emerging from the very difficult past year of 2020, and it is a pleasure to invite the great curator Didier Ottinger to explore the relationship between abstraction and calligraphy, two visual languages, intimately entwined. Louvre Abu Dhabi will offer audiences an exploration of a universal language through pictograms, signs, symbols, lines, and other traces of the hands of the artists. This second major collaboration with Centre Pompidou brings their abstract masterworks – of Cy Twombly, Lee Ufan, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Michaux, Juan Miró, Christian Dotremont, Jean Dubuffet, André Masson, Nasser Al Salem and Brice Marden – here to Abu Dhabi for the first time. This exhibition speaks to the strength of our partner network of museums, and the mutual trust we share in the interest of offering access and moments of discovery to our audiences. We are ready and waiting to welcome visitors back safely, offering this rare opportunity to see so many abstract masterpieces displayed side-by-side with the numerous global influences that shaped this visual language.”

Curator of the exhibition, Didier Ottinger, Deputy Director, Cultural Programming, MNAM-CC, commented, “Exchanges and dialogue characterise the project I developed for Louvre Abu Dhabi—dialogues between spaces and times that are embraced by the Universal Museum; dialogue between images and letters, illustrated by the mutual fascination between calligraphy and image makers, and vice-versa; dialogue in the space between the artists of East and West, dialogues that bring together an ancient Egyptian stele and the ‘pictograms’ of a New York street artist—the shared dream of a universal language.”

Dr. Souraya Noujaim, Scientific, Curatorial and Collections Management Director at Louvre Abu Dhabi, added, “This exhibition brings works by masters of abstraction together with sources of myriad influences. The calligraphic works are far from a unified codex of signs and symbols. They represent the diversity of cultures, languages—written and visual—and histories that span many continents and centuries. In the spirit of Louvre Abu Dhabi, this exhibition establishes a powerful dialogue between two distinct forms of expression – image and writing – revealing the common ground which unites them both. Appearing in unison, the visual and the verbal come together as one, singular form of expression, recalling what Ibn Khaldun terms ‘the two faces of thought.’ Many of the works and artists have never been shown in the region before. It is also the first time that Louvre Abu Dhabi will have works produced in conjunction with an exhibition.”

The first section of the show will focus on pictograms, symbolic figurative images that represented words and ideas in writing in ancient civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Work presented will include a painting by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, who – inspired by his travels to Tunisia – created artwork that combined elements of images and letters stemming from his fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics. His work influenced artists such as Joaquín Torres-García from Spain, Iraqi artist Dia Al-Azzawi and Pakistani artist Anwar Jalal Shemza. This section will also include works from American artist Adolph Gottlieb, inspired by images from Native American art, and French artist André Masson, who was inspired by 17th century Indian figurative inscriptions and Arabic calligraphy.

In line with the history of writing, the second section will focus on signs, which by their very form can express universal ideas. Works on show will include studies of signs by Russian artist Vassily Kandinsky, considered by many to be one of the inventors of abstract art. As an act of resistance to the Western world ravaged by war, many artists turned to Japan and China for inspiration. The signs traced in works by French-Hungarian painter Judit Reigl and German-French painter Hans Hartung echo symbols used by Chinese and Japanese calligraphers. The show will furthermore include works from French artists Georges Mathieu, who tried to develop a lyric and rapid gesture, and Julius Bissier, who was influenced by the Chinese philosophy of Taoism. Finally, Mona Hatoum’s works endeavour to create a new alphabet of signs through found objects.

The third section will be devoted to lineaments, revealing how Western artists appropriated the energy of Eastern calligraphy in their brushstrokes to produce free and fluid lines. In opposition to Western artistic inclination, the Surrealist movement invented a drawing technique called Automatism, using automatic movements to express the subconscious. It allowed them to artistically respond to a tumultuous interwar period between World War I and World War II. On display will be works by Surrealist André Masson as well as works by Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning, who were all influenced by Masson. Visitors will be able to see Jean Dubuffet’s primitive creations, inspired by a combination of graffiti, rock paintings and children’s drawings. Also on show will be Cy Twombly’s gestural drawings for curtains of the Opéra de Paris and Lee Krasner’s works, which take their inspiration from Kufic script from the Iraqi City of Kufa, the birthplace of Arabic calligraphy.

The exhibition will conclude with a section showing how both Western and Eastern artists incorporated calligraphy into their practice, such as Spanish artist Joan Miró, who referenced how closely painting and poetry are linked in the East. Following in his footsteps, the poets Brion Gysin, Henri Michaux and Christian Dotremont pursued the same path by painting poetry, inspired by their trips to North Africa, China and Lapland, respectively. Henri Matisse’s studies for his illustrated book Jazz, which he called “arabesques” in a tribute to Arabic writing, are also included here. Viewers will also discover how regional artists, including Shakir Hassan Al Said and Sliman Mansour, sought to free calligraphy from its purely linguistic function. This section will be completed by two original monumental artworks from contemporary artists—French-Tunisian artist eL Seed and Pakistani artist Sanki King.

The MAMC+ Saint-Étienne Métropole hosts the traveling retrospective exhibition of Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), bringing together in an exceptional way more than 150 of the Emirati artist’s works, rarely exhibited in France.

Hassan Sharif was born in Iran, studied in London, and lived in Dubaï, where he became a pioneer of Conceptual Art in the Middle East. As an artist, educator, and critic, he helped transform the artistic landscape of his country, leading it far beyond the realm of traditional calligraphy, and he remains one of the most influential artists in the Arab world.

Over a period of four decades, Hassan Sharif developed a significant body of work consisting of drawings, paintings, performances, sculptures, and installations. In contrast to this abundant production, the title of the exhibition (I am the single work artist) instead seems to suggest that this work should be seen as a single gesture that was repeated over time.

Hassan Sharif’s practice evolved in a social and economic context that was radically transformed by the discovery of oil in 1958, followed by the creation of the United Arab Emirates in 1971. His work is marked by the rapid transformation of a small land like Dubaï into a megalopolis of luxury. He criticised the forced march of modernisation through the caricatures he published until 1979, at which point he devoted himself entirely to his own artistic practice. His training in London exposed him to British constructivism, Minimal Art, and Fluxus, whose influences he adeptly channelled in his own oeuvre. His performances in the Hatta desert in the early 1980s represent some of the first manifestations of Conceptual Art in the Gulf, as he jumped, threw a stone, filmed rock formations, or disappeared over a dune. He used photographs, collages, and writings to document his actions in his own courtyard, in a taxi, or at a souk.

Through the subversive pop-up exhibitions that he organised with the collective Mureijah Art Atelier, he called viewers’ attentions to the everyday materials and objects he found in increasing amounts in local markets. A process of accumulating, cutting, weaving, and assembling led Sharif to develop a major current in his work, which he termed “urban archaeology”. Starting in the 2000s, as his installations became monumental in scale, he returned to painting, often incorporating these same everyday objects into his canvases. Their grotesque style and expressionist touch depict — with a sense of realism — the more shoddy and coarse aspects of consumer society.

At the same time that Hassan Sharif was completing these installations, he developed a more ascetic and graphic series of works that also made use of repetition: the “Semi-Systems”. He made mathematical calculations and established rules to generate geometric drawings that consisted of a quasi-infinite number of columns and segments of straight lines. He allowed fatigue and boredom to enter the equation and thereby introduce mistakes, which he left visible. Like much of Sharif’s work, the Semi-Systems depict a confrontation of authority, as well as the means of getting around it.

Hassan Sharif’s work is echoed in a number of Western artistic approaches from the late 1970s and 1980s. In continuation of the exhibition, two rooms have been devoted to the MAMC+’s own collections, featuring Minimal Art, Fluxus and Supports/Surfaces in particular.

This exhibition is originally organised by Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, U.A.E., and curated by Hoor Al Qasimi. The European tour of the exhibition has been organised by Sharjah Art Foundation in collaboration with KW Berlin, Malmö Konsthall and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole.

Andakulova Gallery, Dubai, has the privilege of presenting the works of artist Saule Suleimenova from Kazakhstan with an inaugural on 09th March 2021. The exhibition will run till 09th October 2021.

Suleimenova is a visual artist who works with edge-of-the-art techniques and media, including recycled plastic, cellophane and polycarbonate. In a recent daring departure, she has been working with collages on plastic bags and creating cellophane painting. Her artwork is made of plastic bags glued on to polycarbonate sheets.

Pieces of colourful plastic bags are glued with melted silicon glue, on a cover of polycarbonate or plastic bags on polyethylene. Some of the bags are branded with names from boutiques, retail shops, supermarkets, or are just garbage bags.

Suleimenova’s new medium could definitely be food for thought for those who thought polycarbonate and cellophane are items used only in the manufacture of compact discs, DVDs, mobile phones, eyeglasses, or in food packing.

She grew up Soviet Kazakhstan, in Almaty, the then capital of the country. Therefore, decolonisation is a very strong feature in her works. Right at the beginning of her artistic career, she began experimenting with different techniques – water colour, wax-engraving and acrylic on canvas.

At the end of the 1980s, she joined the alternative underground art group Green Triangle, where she was deeply impacted by punk ideas. However, she graduated from an architectural academy. These trends are fundamental to her artistic development.

Post 2004, she turned to contemporary art and began using archive photo-documents of the Kazakh past, of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

“I was trying to express the real face of Kazakhstan, to find a balance neither complimentary nor derogatory. From this time, I started working with interactive photography and painting.

“It helped me discover the idea of how layers of reality and imagination, past and modernity, uncover postcolonial paradigms and reconcile with one’s own identity”, she says.

Madina Tlostanova, Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden, has commented that “through decolonising visuality and particularly, notions of the beautiful, Suleimenova attempts to teach Kazakhs to unlearn their desire for those lacquered ersatz things they were taught to like and appreciate as beautiful, and as their own. She wants to decolonise their idea of Kazakhness …”

In short, Suleimenova tries to reconnect and reconcile traditional Kazakh culture and the aesthetics of revolt through modernist artistic devices. Her art language refers to archaic Kazakh culture, with every gesture a kind of sacral ritual, connecting Kazakh reality to other worlds. Through the poetics of everyday, the finds the pathos of eternity.

Her work has had a strong social impact in Kazakhstan and she takes part in educational, ecological and other social events. For example, she has involved people to bring her plastic bags.

Plastic pollutes and stays in the ground for decades and hardly dissolves. Thousands of tons of not dissolved trash lie in a huge territory of the Kazakh steppe.

Suleimenova started working with plastic bags in 2014. By using this reproducible and not decomposing material, she says she discovers new meanings.

Kelin was a 2015 project, partly collective, which involved gathering plastic bags. “People (were asked to) bring me the bags, so I could turn them to a material for creating artwork,” Suleimenova says.It was hung over the pedestrian street in Almaty. The artwork indicated continuous research into time, history and its place in contemporary practices. The practice took further steps from her studio or plein air paintings, as it dealt directly with the public in a site-specific environment.

Somewhere In The Great Steppe (2017, SIGS) included a series of artworks made of plastic bags, created non-traditionally, without paint or material such as canvas, brush, bronze “or anything institutional,” as Suleimenova puts it. They were exclusively plastic, with the bags collected by the public, assisted by AlaDalaArt (art of the colorful steppe). The programme was begun in 2016.

One Steppe Forward (2019) stems from Suleimenova’s experience of Qazaq Koktemi, which was a series of peaceful protests by Kazakh civil society, in 2019. During this time of social upheaval, thousands of Kazakhstanis protested against a fraudulent presidential election and the unlawful renaming of their capital city, accompanied by other troubling political events. The work reflects the dynamics of Kazakh protest: its faces, bodies and colours.

Plastic gradually became a quintessential expression of Suleimenova’s life and art experience. The material she uses comes from people from different countries, with different backgrounds and life stories. So, when she uses plastic, she recycles not only material artefacts, but also different social and cultural attitudes.

Her work is a mixture of the past and the present, of painting and photography, of steppe and urbanisation. It is a fusion of archetypes, where it is confusing as to what is artificial and what is real.

Her work has been commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, sold in Christie’s auction in London, and exhibited at Self Festival of the 56th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 11 in Zürich, Second Moscow Biennale, East of Nowhere exhibition in Turin, Foundation 107, One Belt One Road exhibition of Hong Kong Women Federation and in many other local and international projects.

Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery

This March, Meem Gallery will present a solo exhibition of the work of celebrated Iraqi artist, Dia al-Azzawi.

Painted in Dia al-Azzawi’s recently established studio in Lebanon, set back from the water in

a shady grove just next to Nabu Museum, which was opened in October 2018, these recent paintings exude a fresh vibrancy that may have sprung from the change of scenery— especially the change between London and the tranquil and picturesque northern Lebanese coastal town of Chekka, close to the city of Batroun.

Azzawi as an artist has never been restricted in his exploration of time, space or creative imagination. While he may often use a distinct range of colours and some typical cultural motifs and artistic techniques, the worlds he creates within his canvases truly know no bounds.

Courtesy of Meem Gallery

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the trees that because its handle was made of wood, it was one of them.

Sfeir-Semler gallery is enormously proud to announce the reopening of its Beirut space with Marwan Rechmaoui’s solo exhibition. Despite the severe economic and political crisis we are going through in Lebanon since October 2019, despite the August 4th, 2020 blast that destroyed hundreds of lives, and wrecked our space, despite the sanitary crisis that has brought the whole world to a halt, despite it all, we resist, in pursuit of our mission to promote the city’s brilliant cultural scene and to offer the world a window to look through.

Marwan Rechmaoui is a conceptual sculptor who works predominantly with concrete, metal, found materials, textile, rubber and wax. Throughout his career he has produced work related to, or based on, the socio-geographies of cities, often focusing on Beirut. In the wake of last August’s explosion, he started working in the rubbles of the gallery space, determined to preserve vanishing moments by embedding them into solid material. He produced works that reflect on a decaying political system, and on the thousands of disoriented desperate Lebanese that fill the streets of the city. This new body of works responds to the ongoing Pillars series which he started in 2014. While clearly referring to rotting foundations, or decaying abandoned structures, the roughness of the work is often lightened by a touch of humor or an unexpected poetic insert.

In a drawing cabinet, the artist presents his personal diary that chronicles on notebooks and drawing paper thoughts and images about daily news, events happening around him, music, his garden.

The exhibition also presents the most recent addition to the Buildings series, The Coop, reproduces to scale the abandoned Raouché Market, the steel and cement incomplete structure that still stands in the south of Beirut. It is the result of a joint venture started by 575 vendors who had to evacuate their stalls and kiosks on the waterfront in 1982, after the Israeli invasion. The construction of the 600-unit large indoors market was halted in 1986.

Beirut by the sea is one of Rechmaoui’s wall sculptures showing an aerial view of the city’s coast. Following the city’s districts that he mapped multiple times, the work is composed of 13 pieces, each representing one of the 13 coastal boroughs in solid concrete, another reminder of the corruption that has robbed people of beachfront public spaces, invaded by landfills or private resorts.

Systematically cataloguing buildings, streets, sites and unfinished structures, Rechmaoui examines the traces of recent and ancient historical moments. His interest in the making and construction of cities brings forward complex questions around the formation of multi-cultural identities, and mirrors socio-political structures through themes of urbanization and contemporary demographics.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Belgian artist Sophie Kuijken’s fifth exhibition, following her 2020 show in Brussels. Shielded from the limelight for nearly 20 years, then unveiled for the first time in 2011 at the Dhondt-Dhaenens Museum, under the encouragement of its director Joost Declerq, Sophie Kuijken’s pictorial oeuvre is a highly singular addition to the art of portraiture.

Following in the footsteps of Flemish painting, Sophie Kuijken’s work disrupts the genre’s traditional codes from the inside, by adopting a deeply troubling contemporary approach. In an atypical space between two worlds, her portraits are imbued with a paradoxical presence, at once silent and scrutinising, human and spectral, blurring the contours of humanity. The exhibition presents ten new paintings on wood panel and, for the first time, on canvas, which, more than ever, arouses in the viewer that sense of “disquieting weirdness” to which Sophie Kuijken possesses the secret.

Sophie Kuijken’s works look, at first sight, like classical portraits on a dark ground, in the style of the Flemish Primitives. True to a long pictorial tradition that originated in the invention of oil paint, the artist works patiently by applying primers, layers and glacis onto the surface of the supports, whether wood or canvas. While acrylic allows for creating textural contrast, it is oil painting that achieves pictorial effects whose subtleties are intensified by the layers of glacis and varnish: shadows, the textures of fabrics and velvets, the nuances of skin and tone…

More broadly, the history of art permeates these paintings by way of certain details, postures, reminiscences that are more subconscious than intentional. The stretched silhouettes, for instance, and the raw flesh tones recall Mannerism; the elongated bodies in the work D.Z. evoke depositions from the cross; a female figure echoes the famous odalisques; a three-quarter, full- length portrait resembles a strange mirror image of Antonello da Messina’s St. Sebastian; and the hand that captures the light in the portrait L.M.T. can be seen as a nod to the deeply expressive hands of Egon Schiele.

These underground influences enter into resonance with an active and systematic approach of collecting information on the internet. The artist sifts through hundreds of images and gleans, from this vast database, elements that, once assembled according to the feeling generated when they are confronted with each other, become her subjects. These artificially recreated beings thus mark an original counterpoint to the history of portraiture that was once intrinsically linked to a live model. This multiplicity of sources, this primordial dispersion of the subject establishes a diffuse mystery, that of a half-familiar, half-chimerical figure that flirts with the bizarre. The old-fashioned appearance of these portraits enhances the feeling of “disquieting weirdness,” while the accessories or details that the artist bestows upon her characters makes the Freudian content even more coherent. Sophie Kuijken freely draws from the historical convention of giving the model a certain number of attributes that reveal their social status, their ethos. Punctuating each of these compositions with exquisite vagueness are a sunflower in the place of a foot, a lunar blackbird nesting in the topmost part of the painting, or an animal muzzle that converses with the semi-nudity of a person of indeterminate gender.


These incongruous associations show a tension between two opposites, like a painting whose strength lies in its contradictions, in avoidance. But, against all odds, they impose themselves in an impassive and natural manner, at the heart of each work, under the guise of mysterious affinities that determine their universe.
In fact, the ambiguity of these portraits also lies in the pure, imperturbable presence, within the pictorial field. The absence of background deprives the figures from any historic or contextual anchor, accentuating their spectral and timeless character: the bodies levitate in a nocturnal space that cradles them gently. Light suffuses their diaphanous skin in an effect of transparency that contrasts with the obscurity of the backgrounds and the opacity of hues, warm and dark, subtly nuanced.

The many layers of paint and glacis represent all the steps that are needed for these semi-real figures to emerge from the shadows. This strange community seems to have always been there, in a state of expectancy that imposes, in turn, a period of contemplation.

With great technical prowess, the artist works on the phenomena of memory and recognition, summoning at once the long history of art and the common, random and impersonal quality of digital resources. Under their classical style, Sophie Kuijken’s paintings contain a deep marginality that is as comforting as it is disquieting, and in which each viewer is free to recognise himself.

Courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia

An exhibition of paintings made between 2017 and 2020 in Austria, Switzerland and Lebanon.

“I grew up among colors and paintings; always fascinated by the idea of living with an artist, my father, Jamil Molaeb. Very often, I skipped school days to stay with him in his workshop.

At age six, I started studying classical music and trained as a violist.

At age seventeen, I moved to Salzburg, Austria to study at Mozarteum University, and then moved to Vienna to study at the University of Music and the Arts: Eight years of study before settling in Zürich, Switzerland.

I came back to painting like one goes back to their parents’ house in the village, as if to restore one’s roots.

Our ancestors did not feel rest until they dug their hands in the soil, planted the ground and enjoyed production. I find this rest when I fill my hands in oil paint and produce a painting.

I travelled the world with music: to China, America and Europe. But it was only through painting that I could travel back to my roots.

I learned how to paint while thinking as a musician. My paintings are based on harmony. Just like in music, each work has a harmonic, melodic and rhythmical structure. I think of the relation between colors like I think of intonation in music.

Mountains. Water. Space. A warm childlike world. Clear, luminous fields. Mysterious metaphysical poems. I leave it to the viewer to feel what my work resonates with.”

– Ribal Molaeb

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz

The installation Beirut Kaputt? is a reflection on the representation of violence. It consists of two juxtaposed works: a video montage of social media clips of the Beirut Port explosion and the painting All That Remains by Lebanese artist Ayman Baalbaki.

The project allows reflecting on the constant recycling of traumatic news, imagery, headlines and captions and how this can add to, rather than appease, our traumatic experiences. How, rather than engaging in nuanced reflection, fast media often exploits traumatic events by triggering a most basic human emotion: fear.

Curated by: Stephane Sisco

Leila Heller is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of contemporary Korean artist Ran Hwang, titled “Hope Springs Eternal” and open May to July.
Due to the pandemic, everyone in the world is facing physical challenges and feeling mentally taxed. The health crisis has even prompted a significant increase in the rates of crime and suicide. “Hope Springs Eternal” consists of a series of work created during quarantine and fueled by the artists compulsion to seek inner peace and mental stability. In this exhibition, Hwang focuses on small cherry blossom works that are bright and joyful, following the religious practices of Buddhism and hoping to bring light to people’s hearts and heal their inner wounds.

Ran Hwang’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Pondering the themes of cyclicality and learnt appreciation for the time’s ephemerality accompanies the artist’s works. Hwang’s installations serve as monuments to a human’s perpetual attempts to capture and prolong a fleeting moment. In this case, the cherry blossoms are subjects of Hwang’s series as they stand to represent nature’s vulnerability to imperfect conditions and inevitability of life’s transient nature. In her Cherry Blossoms, the artist hopes to convey a meditative state to the audience, inviting the viewer to trace the delicate motions of the blossom’s falling petals succumbed to the imminent progression of time.

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

With drawings by artists trained everywhere from Paris to Jerusalem, and subject matters ranging from the Syrian uprisings to the burning of the National Library of Baghdad, it offers new views of societies whose challenges are well-known in the press but are little known through the prism of contemporary art.

Featuring around 100 works on paper – from etchings to photographs and artists’ books – the majority of works in the exhibition have been collected in the past decade. They highlight topics of gender, identity, history and politics, while also exploring poetic traditions and the intersections between past and present. There is no single narrative but a multiplicity of stories.

The exhibition in Room 90 continues in the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World

To coincide with the exhibition, the British Museum has published a richly illustrated accompanying book of the same name, written by Venetia Porter with Natasha Morris and Charles Tripp.

Check our conversation with Dr Venetia Porter – published in the latest issue of Selections – for more info on the show

Mark Hachem Gallery has the pleasure of inviting you to its first solo exhibition of the year: “Blooming Skies” by Chaouki Chamoun!

Chaouki Chamoun’s compositions are ever-growing, and so are his abstractness and sensitivity. The result is a symphony of colours that call upon our most refined senses and spontaneous faith as well as feelings of love in tragic times, all in a chromatic structure that evolves beyond limits, in favor of the chromatic entity itself.

While it’s true that Chaouki Chamoun’s works are a series, every time you look at them, you interpret them in a new language, a timeless language where the rules are deconstructed and then reshaped.

Courtesy of Mark Hachem Gallery

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to announce the first Paris solo exhibition for acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist Lari Pittman. Opening on the 19th of May, Lari Pittman: Dioramas will debut a suite of new paintings that reflect on the continued political and personal resonance of the past. Through a group of large-scale canvases to more intimate works, Pittman draws on the rich history of the decorative arts, yielding optically dazzling compositions of interlocking forms and motifs that are dense with pictorial references and symbolism. The larger body of works in the exhibition explore the linked histories of France and the United States, taking as its central subject a 19th-century parure: an ensemble of jewels meant to be worn together. Rendered in brilliant colors over darker grounds, turquoise and coral items of jewelry are framed by rope garlands and beset by creatures—caterpillars, moths, flies, rats, and ravens—that recall the iconography of Baroque still lifes. Similarly, a group of smaller canvases depict elaborately embellished gourds alongside totemistic animal presences. Pittman’s compositions thus resonate with the vanitas tradition, in which opulent symbols of wealth and beauty are represented alongside animals that devour and destroy, in allegories of the fleeting nature of life and its material seductions.

The ornate surfaces of the works in Dioramas are unified by Pittman’s imposition of painted rectilinear bars on the lower half of each painting, emphasizing their flatness and creating a visual and conceptual barrier between the canvases and the viewer’s space. With these railings, Pittman conspicuously invokes the titular notion of a diorama—a conceit long used by museums to display historical artifacts in vignettes that suggest preconceived narratives. Like the tableaux of such dioramas, Pittman’s paintings establish a formal relationship with the viewer, arranging and reconstituting historical allusions and fragments for the present day. The jewelry, for example, is inscribed with dates of important milestones in the national histories of the United States and France: 1776, 1789, 1863, 1871, and 1944. These years mark the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Paris Commune, and the Liberation of Paris—moments of both violence and liberation. Eschewing literal illustration of these landmark political events in favor of decorative analogs comprised of gorgeous fragments, Pittman’s dioramas operate as contemporary history paintings, reflecting on the opulence and traumas of the past in order to invite contemplation on the complex opportunities and risks of the present day.

Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy

Agial Art Gallery presents Hala Mouzannar’s exhibition La chasse aux papillons

Hala Mouzannar gives prominence in her work to the materiality, and vicissitudes, of the flesh. She dwells on the material surface of her canvases, creating tears, crusts, and chutes from the manipulation of a mélange of stone powder, silicon, latex, gauze, and oils. The formation of differently textured surfaces, in a range of exuberant and at times corporeal colours, invokes in the viewer visceral bodily sensations of both (interested) pleasure and perturbation.

Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery

Marfa’ reopened on Friday May 21, 2021 with a group exhibition titled Water.
Water brings together a group of artists from the gallery around a universal and unifying subject. Through water, we are all connected, physically as well as metaphorically.

This show features a wide range of media including film, photography, painting, sculpture and multi-sensory installation. Each artist represents this theme through their unique standpoint; bringing forth the poetic, the scientific, the political, the social and the overall versatile nature of water.

This show is Marfa’s contribution to the global initiative Galleries Curate.

Courtesy of Marfa’

“Recent Days have witnessed an increased interest in shows for mutant people, and we’re not, of course, talking about transgender people, but rather another type of shapeshifting.

Huge shows are organised for some patients of psychiatric clinics for the benefit of the ruling institutions, and the show schedule includes the following steps, the patient advances to a wide arena, after which the doctors begin to provoke his anger, given that they are specialists, which of course qualifies them to know all the stimuli that will anger the patient and motivate him to screaming, crying and collapsing. The attendees enjoy these shows and consider it as weekly entertainment after a hard week of work. As for the attendees, most of them are wealthy families, some political officials, army commanders, and some foreign communities working for the government and the diplomatic corps.

The promoter of the shows pleaded with the audience not to take their children with them in the next show, as the next show will transform the patients into animals like elephants or monkeys or aliens and amputees – as doctors have come up with drugs and meticulous surgeries to convert patients into a metamorphosis – a strange looking monster which of course, helps to attract more audiences and from further countries and provinces. The performances used to arouse laughter and enjoyment in the audience, but later they desired more than just laughter. They demanded that touching, playing, and hitting be allowed to the abused patients. However, the real problem was that theatre could turn into an arena for chaos if the audience desire were fulfilled. The public appealed to the officials to solve the issue. Indeed, television channels began to pay attention and arrange to meet with some experts to find a way to implement what the public demands.

Vast areas of gardens have already been built on an area of nearly a thousand square meters, and some buildings have been designated as a hospital with specialised doctors practicing their experimental research regarding transforming patients. As for some other buildings, it is devoted to a special area for international restaurants and cafes, between the sides of which a lot of iron cages are spread, in which patients stand still, where the visitor can provide them with food, and are even allowed to enter some cages in which patients are not serious, such as the example of patients with amputees and the like. Park officials resorted to adding new weekly entertainment activities, as they decided to provide weapons that fire small iron balls, to be used by the public during a two-hour program in which sick and mutant persons are released from their cages and visitors fired their guns at them, which brings fun to children. The rules of the game require that prizes be given to the winners.

Several years has passed and the park became world famous so as it even became one of the most important tourist sights. You can try visit it at any time of the day and night, you will always find it full of tourists and TV presenters, and sometimes you may get to spot many movie stars while shooting movies or drama series. Due to the increase in tourist groups, the park faced an important crisis, which is the small number of patients compared to the huge number of park-goers, so newspapers, televisions and radio stations were filled with announcements about the National Campaign for getting better information around statistics of Mental and Psychiatric Patients in the country, Awareness campaigns start urging citizens to hand over their children and relatives to the General Administration of the Park and the Mental and Psychiatric Diseases Center. The campaign doctors explained that this project is not just a garden or a clinic, but rather a monument to be built on the efforts of researchers, academics and political leaders as well, in addition to the fact that it carries a national goal to support the economy through tourism, which would restore the state & political position.

Severe congestion, a traffic crisis, a festive atmosphere in the areas surrounding the park, and terrible numbers of families who came to deliver some patients tied with ropes, everyone was sitting in groups next to their sick relatives, and the park and its surrounding areas were filled with children, youth and the mentally ill. Some of them were dancing in the middle of a circle of citizens shouting joyfully and applauding, trying to increase the dose of fun so someone tries, for example, to hold a patient, tie his feet and slap him severely, while the patient tries to resist when one of the citizens attracts him, so he falls again. The dose of fun and laughter increased at the end of the day when most of the patients began to dance while crying and screaming, their bodies almost naked, covered with a paste that was nothing but a mixture of blood and dirt.” – Ahmed Sabry

Courtesy of Mashrabia Gallery Of Contemporary Art

Leila Heller Gallery is pleased to announce Eduardo Perez-Cabrero’s solo show “Silent Day”.

Eduardo explores life from his epidermis, captures vibrations and transmits them to his pieces directly. His work is refreshingly free and unconstrained by convention. In his new show at Leila Heller Gallery, Eduardo is presenting eight pieces, from which the installation titled
“I will take you up to the stars” occupies the show’s main wall with more than 400 pieces of blue ceramics. There are three other pieces in brushed aluminum. His other three-dimensional resin artworks express the language of shape and colour, leaving an indelible impression that is both rational and dreamlike.

Eduardo’s artwork is characteriSed by the influence of the Mediterranean Sea and its culture; his production consists primarily of sculptures with organic references. He works with rounded and sinuous shapes in large formats, created in aluminum, brass, resins, cement and ceramics. An exaltation of “Joie de vivre”, it is optimistic, clear and direct. Eduardo’s work is sincere, simple and pure. The conceptual artwork messages parallel his way of understanding life; in some cases, appearing as intriguing, mysterious and even enigmatic, a side that invites us to see these works in a more introspective dimension.

Abandoning traditional methods of sculpture, Eduardo favors a more contemporary, impulsive form of expression. He distills the essence of visual impact, processes it and generates pieces with a simple, playful design, using an ingenious production process. The conceptual content of many of his works explores genetics, rather than the environment in which we evolve, as a fundamental driver of human beings’ journey. The sinuous, organic forms of his pieces draw a parallel with the cells that move the values of humanity.

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

From whirling, Expressionist sunsets with deep, sombre hues, the light dwindles, and the wandering mind of the astronomer within us is compelled to gaze upon the night sky. Our eyes fall on a luminary of great literary and poetic significance: the moon.

Amir Khojasteh’s solo exhibition, Try To Catch The Moon, implies the impossibility of this physical endeavour, and simultaneously, the triumphant overcoming thereof. Suspended within a twilight zone, with forms that overlay and intertwine, fold and unfurl, his paintings and sculptures tread the line between rest and unrest, peace and chaos.

Khojasteh continuously weighs the scales between two themes to provide a deeper insight into our own human nature. The exhibition details a story of hope and defeat, and juxtaposes them with their counterparts, denial and acceptance.

In his practise, Khojasteh continually weaves and untangles narratives from art history. In oil paintings from 2018, he cited Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing The Alps. The works examined the warped significance Napoleon Bonaparte attached to his perceived image and title, and considered the painting’s exploitation of such factors for propaganda.

The Try To Catch The Moon paintings revolve around two symbols: the moon and the horse. He explores the act of catching the moon as a metaphorical representation for achievement and victory, and the horse as a means for man towards greatness and power. Bold, sweeping brushstrokes dominate the canvases, comparable to the dynamic manner Bonaparte chose to be depicted. It is this departure from authenticity that underlies Khojasteh’s whole artistic practice. To obscure visages of morally disputed political leaders, or “fear-makers”, he shifts swathes and broad pathways of paint on the textural terrain of his paintings, as an effort to detract from otherwise “candid” portraiture. An audacity in simplicity.

The sculptures are sumptuous in shape – deflated, elongated and smoothened, and are reminiscent of the dynamic portrayal of Bonaparte, stretching towards the heavens. With the sculptures Touch the moon and Touch the sun, Khojasteh manipulates physical material to explore the hypothetical thought of placing the moon atop his sculpture as a way to “catch the moon”, or to eternalise a victory – but for the Sad Fighter, a victory is short-lived in the face of forever.

From a man who was hungry for change, Amir Khojasteh depicts the Sad Fighter with a sullen glow; a man now, whose ambitions are suppressed by reality. Monotonous mossy greens reminiscent of military attire threaten to drag these characters into non-existence; to become yet another man clad in uniform, a hopeful person turned hopeless.

And similar to a weary man in spectacle of the moon, soaked in its moonlight, basking in its beauty, grace, and tenderness – all else dissipates in our peripheral. Its painful distance makes the heart of the restless fighter within us grow with hope. It is a type of hope that distinguishes the embers from the ashes, a type of hope that knows no end – perhaps, to no avail.

Courtesy of Carbon 12

Sedimentary Matters addresses the changeability and the undercurrents of the hidden material and physical world. The seemingly solid and permanent spaces of our lives are not static, but they are made of various events that are kept hidden, that constantly transform the space into a new one. In this exhibition, Caline Aoun encapsulates these hidden events by revealing how the continuous accumulation of matter essentially changes what we see. As we constantly find ways to move through the material, natural, social, and symbolic environments of our lives, they are in fact constantly changing and evolving. In Sedimentary Matters, Aoun brings the unseen to the forefront as she examines how the actions of time can leave deposits and traces, like a river delta, otherwise kept unnoticed or invisible. Aoun also shows that within the process of this gallery and other galleries’ bygone activities across the years, tangible forms are created from the deposition of otherwise invisible traces. These are signs that bear witness to the ever-changing and moving cycles, and rhythms of the spaces and the objects we encounter.

In Condensations of the Invisible Space, a freezer compressor is artificially holding below the freezing point a sheet of aluminum that is accumulating dew and water due to the condensation of the humidity in the space. Here, by employing thermodynamics, this sculptural work transmutes and makes visible the physical form of humidity in the space over the course of its installation, which otherwise would be invisible.

Fictional Accumulation of Real Shadows’ Past is an installation comprising of suspended pieces of cotton fabric taking over an entire wall of the gallery. These pieces of fabric represent the shadows of all the artworks that once hung on that exact wall from many artists’ exhibitions since 2012, hence fictionally accumulating the shadows of the past 9 years of this specific wall’s art activity in one space and at the same time.

Cyan and Yellow, 4 Hours and 42 minutes and Untitled, 8 Meters are two prints that foreground and make visible the material components of a print through space and time. The first by layering over 60 times Cyan and Yellow monochromes on a single paper to a point where traces of the printer’s mechanics start to appear on the surface as well as the tangible nature of the pigment. The second by printing in layers on a translucent film and manually handling the material by pulling the latter while printing in order to show the traffic and movements of the ink head as well as the ink droplets it is in the meantime depositing.

In Traces of Unseeable Excess (Detail), A sprinkle of ink appears on a paper. This is a section from Aoun’s wallpaper installation from a previous exhibition. She had installed a fountain, but instead of having jets of water pumped into the air, jets of ink were being pumped over and over during the entire exhibition. As time passed and as the fountain continually pumped ink, it accumulated and sprayed ink droplets on the walls which were covered with paper and that were nearby causing this sedimentary look of unseeable excess. Here Aoun is interested in re-presenting the traces of these splashes that were effected in a previous exhibition in order to accentuate the natural permeability between exhibitions and how one can leave a token for the next.

Courtesy of Grey Noise gallery

Under Construction, a group exhibition held in two parts, presents a series of incomplete, evolving, overlapping, paradoxical concepts – building structures, formulating symbols, manufacturing appearance, fabricating histories and reconstituting anatomies. The first iteration features works by Hamra Abbas (b. 1976, Kuwait), Mounir Fatmi (b. 197, Morocco), Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (b. 1962, UAE), Nadia Kaabi-Linke (b. 1978, Tunisia), Driss Ouadahi (b. 1959, Morocco) and Nathaniel Rackowe (b. 1975, UK).

The exhibition includes artworks by Driss Ouadahi and Nathaniel Rackowe, both inspired following separate visits to Dubai in the midst of the construction boom of the last decade. Ouadahi’s Laisse Béton (Let It Go) is part of a series modelled on impressions of Dubai, from various photographs meshed with images from his memory.

Rackowe’s bitumen paintings are studies of light and shadows, the compositions selected from hundreds of photographs taken while driving through diverse areas of Dubai in May 2014. Recreated for the exhibition, his floor sculpture Pathfinding is closely related to Luminous Territory – Rackowe’s current installation throughout Alserkal Avenue – and the artwork featured on Lawrie Shabibi’s facade.

A broader sense of construction runs through the other works in the exhibition. Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim presents a selection of assemblage and papier maché wall sculptures that stem from his Line series of paintings. Executed in black and white the works recall road markings, derived from his number system based on tally charts.

Hamra Abbas’ series of marble ‘drawings’ entitled Open Cube: After LeWitt appropriate LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cube drawings. In contrast to his works, however, Abbas inlays the broken forms with jet black marble, adding density to the shapes and reinstating her fascination with the colour black.

Mounir Fatmi’s Circles 2 weaves together several layers: the Cartesian geometric theorem determining the points at which circles ‘kiss’ or touch one another, that inspired The Kissing Precise, a poem by Frederick Soddy; Fatmi’s interest in obsolete technologies used for the propagation of ideology and data, seen here in his use of co-axial antenna cables; and, the deconstruction of strict notions of ‘painting’, ‘drawing’ and sculpture using his signature medium.

Finally, Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Jins Al Latif (The Gentle Sex), made from hundreds of sets of manicure and pedicure instruments, and arranged as an inscription in square Kufic (an ornamental Arabic script often found in monumental architecture), comments on the implausibility of such hazardous steel instruments being used for beauty care, and the efforts required to construct and maintain appearance.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

The 15th edition of Contemporary Istanbul, with the main sponsorship of Akbank, will be the first such event that will launch the revival of the art scene of Istanbul, with a VIP preview on June 1-2 and open to all from June 3 to 6, 2021. Contemporary Istanbul will come together with art lovers in the Lütfi Kırdar Rumeli Halls. The fair, which will feature contemporary art galleries in Turkey, will be held in line with the COVID-19 measures with all precautions taken to this effect.

Following a protracted pause, the 15th Contemporary Istanbul art fair, under the main sponsorship of Akbank, is coming together with art lovers at the Istanbul Lütfi Kırdar Convention and Exhibition Center Rumeli Halls. Participants are contemporary art galleries from Turkey. This edition of Contemporary Istanbul, which cooperates with art institutions and institutes to ensure a sustainable art environment, includes the Contemporary Istanbul Foundation (CIF), Akbank Sanat, Baksı Museum, Borusan Contemporary, Odunpazarı Modern Art Foundation (OMM) and Otonom Art Events.

Supporting the development of contemporary art in Turkey and including international projects in different disciplines of art, Akbank Sanat will take its place at the fair with an interesting exhibition this year, just like in every other edition.

Each gallery will invite selected artists to the fair, and bring collectors and artists together on the “Artist Day” scheduled for June 1, which will go on throughout the day with the participation of artists whose works are exhibited through solo exhibitions.

Galleries Participating in the Fair

Anna Laudel, Istanbul, Dusseldorf; Art On Istanbul, Istanbul; Art Refinery, Istanbul; Artopol Art Gallery, Istanbul; Bozlu Art Project, Istanbul; C24 Gallery, New York; CEP Gallery, Istanbul; De Artium, Istanbul; Dirimart, Istanbul; Faar Art Gallery, Istanbul; Gallery 77, Istanbul; Gallery Binyıl, Istanbul; Gallery Diani, Istanbul; Gallery MCRD, Istanbul; Gallery / Miz, Istanbul; Gallery Nev Istanbul, Istanbul; Gallery Siyah Beyaz, Istanbul, Ankara; Gama Gallery, Istanbul; Öktem Aykut, İstanbul; Pi Artworks, Istanbul, London; Piramid Art, Istanbul; Sanatorium, Istanbul; Sevil Dolmacı Art Gallery, Istanbul; Vision Art Platform, Istanbul; x-ist, Istanbul; Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul, Berlin

Artists taking part in Plugin Istanbul
Aypera, Ahmet Rüstem, Can Büyükberber, Ece Gözen, Enes Özenbaş & Ethem Cem, Güvenç Özel, Hakan Sorar, Sofia Crespo H.o, Mert Kızılay & Hakan Gündüz, Maxim Zhestkov, Mario Klin-gemann, Murat Yıldırım, Onur Sönmez, Void and Yonca Karakaş

15. Contemporary Istanbul Program
June 1-2 VIP Preview
June 3-6 General Visiting Days

Maitha Abdalla has produced a body of work across varied mediums which interrogates the gravity and uncertainty of the in-between years of adolescence. Tradition, transformation and paradox are at the core of this work as the individual transitions from youth to adulthood; shifting in outer appearance, social status, and identity. Abdalla perceives this formative and liminal time in our life journey to be a dream-like moment where fantasy and reality conflate. Drawing from regional folktales, faith-based traditions and mythologies, animals are a recurring symbol throughout Abdalla’s practice; most commonly the pig and the rooster.

For Abdalla, the rooster is a creature of purity that embodies forgiveness and innocence while the pig is its opposing force, understood to be sinful in Islam. In the context of her art, this duality represents the moment when one leaves childhood where they harbour no responsibility for their actions into adulthood – a place with newfound responsibility and autonomy.

Inspired by theatre, fantasy, tradition and ritual, there’s always a performative element in Abdalla’s art. Working across mediums, the artist has produced several works on canvas, a series of photographs and an installation for this exhibition.

Courtesy of Tabari Artspace

Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present ‘Caen sílabas negras’, the first solo show in the gallery by the artist Julia Llerena (Sevilla, 1985).
Some time ago, I came across a collection of poems in which I found the following statement: you can make a poem out of anything[1]. In the embroidered verses of Julia Llerena’s works we find plummeting syllables, hands modeling words and the desire to turn them into matter. Gliph of thread that before being thread was machine and, prior to it, a voice, a breath. Breath: warmth and shelter. Sheets, ceramics and broken logs that enumerate the intimate geography of the artist and invite us to be accomplices of this day-to-day lair in which language unfolds.

According to Barthes, text means weave. A weave behind which the meaning (the truth) is found, more or less hidden, and where we accentuate the generative idea that the text is produced, it is worked through a perpetual interlacing, in which the subject is lost and undone immersed in it[2]. A well-executed embroidery is identical on both of its sides, so in this technique the importance falls on the finish on the back, what is hidden from view. However, if what is embroidered is a writing, reversibility is impossible or, in any case, it can only occur from illegibility. The doing of the unweaving, transferred to the making of the text, recalls that all writing implies un-writing[3]. The three large pieces that we find in the room do not hide the punctured back of the canvas; they rather invite in their meandering arrangement to a bodily reading of the verses – now adulterated echoes – contained in the backing. A journey in which the alleged intelligibility of the hidden face does not influence because everything is shown; there is no orthodox character or symbol, nor (in)correct reading order. The artist’s action, then, is not circumscribed in a merely additive progression; undoing what is done is part of the narrative that is built between the warp and the weft, on which an imprint remains; hole and trace of thread or ink, phantasmagoria of the blank sheet. In these works, the embroidered verses on linen are not configured as a mere handwriting artifact, nor is there a concern to offer any translation: there is a pulse to repress the text as such, addressing the poetic gesture as the action of decoding and rewriting the literal inscription of the words. The poetic trespasses the appearance and becomes material fact that occupies the mouth and throat, overflowing the exclusivity of the page[4]. The poem is born in the breath, a harmony linked between the babbling, the murmur and the verb. The phonemic is manipulated in a simultaneous exercise of fragmentation and condensation through electronic intervention. Using the spectrometer, the verses are turned into failed calligrams, fleshy topographies that capture the tactile and granular intensities of the poems selected by the artist.

A spectrogram is the graphic representation of sound frequencies, even those imperceptible to the human ear. The origin of the term has an ambivalence that transports us to what emerges and is perceptible through the eye and, also, to what is invisible to it; to an elusive, ghostly presence. In these pieces, the use of the spectrogram is not enunciated as a technical fetish, but rather from Julia’s interest in deploying the evocative potentiality of absence; the voids that she tends to introduce in a large part of her production, both installative and sculptural. Spirits and memory. Here appears, the vision in the room of some wooden branches, whose rhythm is interrupted by cavities filled with glass; or porcelain vases supported by pieces of clear glass. There is no desire for restitution, nor repair in the holes that go through the works. The operation is simple: to displace the antagonism between the hollowness and the abundance, directing the value towards the fragility that sustains the fragments that make up a whole. Life happens in the interstices. Nothingness is not a crude absence, but the infinite fullness of openness. The hollow is where the void rests and, in turn, excavation. Imitating the methodology of the poems embroidered on linen, I proceed to use the voices of other authors, thus summoning the poet Heather Christle and Didi-Huberman. The first, affirms that writing poems is not very different from drilling a hole that others have previously made[5]; the second indicates that sculpting is like excavating the earth. In both cases, artistic practice involves rolling up your sleeves: the search requires entering the hole, the void, as an exercise in non-linear anamnesis. To unearth is to extract a treasure, a vestige, a corpse; but it also consists of preparing the land, tilling it into new forms that contain in themselves the becoming of memory, projecting it towards future growth[6].

Caen sílabas negras is a loose verse by Gamoneda, the only poem fragment that is revealed with written words –through typographic elements– in the gallery. Titles always have weigh. The fall contains uncertainty, which entails a discovery. There is something that precipitates, that seems to descend when understanding appears throughout our lives, as if the collapse – and its blow – were a trance towards knowledge and learning. This exhibition is an invocation to muffle the impact of the fall, making the excavation a caress: With the hands the words are formed / With the hands and in its concavity[7] / digs the earth of the speech[8]. These verses immersed in the cloth, the deep holes that we form and leave; this perpetual intertwining of whisper, crystal, suture and air, may be an attempt to touch the thought or the unborn tongue.

Raquel G. Ibáñez
Mayo 2021

[1] Willliam Carlos Williams. Kora en el infierno: improvisaciones.1920.
[2] Roland Barthes. El placer del texto y lección inaugural. 1973.
[3] Selina Blasco. Las labores del texto y sus metáforas desde el tejido. 2018.
[4] Brandon LaBelle. Oralidad cruda. Poesía sonora y cuerpos vivos. 2020.
[5] Heather Christle. El libro de las lágrimas. 2019.
[6] Georges Didi-Huberman. Ser cráneo: lugar, contacto, pensamiento, escultura. 2009.
[7] José Ángel Valente. XXVI; El fulgor. Antología poética (1953 -2000). 2001.
[8] John Berger. Palabras II. Poesía 1955-2008. 2014.

Courtesy of Sabrina Amrani Gallery

The group of paintings gathered in this exhibition is exceptional. Firstly, because the artist’s works are rare and not widely exhibited: although Julije Knifer, born 1924 in Osijek, Croatia, is one of the major representatives of the Eastern European avant-garde, his contributions are still not sufficiently acknowledged in accounts of post-war art. Together with the members of the Gorgona group, which he co-founded in 1960, he helped put Zagreb on the map of a then increasingly open and multipolar art world. Secondly, because the works on display were all created during a key period in the artist’s life, the years 1969-73, before he started spending more time in Germany, and then France, where his techniques and formats changed significantly. Finally, the selected works are exceptional because they feature four paintings that break with the typical black and white of Knifer’s art – a rarity within a rarity, so to speak. Two of them show black meanders on a gold background (Untitled, 1969), the third has a grey background (MK 73-7, 1973), while the fourth features two cobalt blue meanders on a black background (SP VIII 3, 1973). Together with the other known examples from this period, there are no more than a dozen works of this kind, including two blue meanders on a gold background.

The sobriety of Knifer’s pictorial language is hardly compromised by these minimal chromatic intrusions, but still distinct from the paintings structured by alternating black and white, such as BGS No. 3 (1973), also on display in the exhibition. In contrast to the latter’s horizontal, rhythmic spread, the chromatic works are characterised by barely developed meanders: three to four segments contained within the same horizontal and vertical boundaries, forming a pattern of perfect clarity. In comparison, the interlocking meanders of SP VIII 4 (1973), which recall earlier variations on the same motif, disturb the viewer’s perception: they turn back on themselves in the manner of a Greek fret, of which the meander [i.e. Knifer’s meander] is never more than a simplification, creating interpretative ambiguities by reversing figure and background. Reduced to the status of an emblem, the meander – Knifer’s favorite motif – has a lasting effect on the viewer’s perception. It transforms the paintings into a means for meditation, indicating that, for the artist, art is a form of absolute concentration. Combined with the golden background of Orthodox icons, which the artist had studied on numerous trips to monasteries all over Yugoslavia, and the respect for a strict two-dimensionality, which in this case signifies the absence of a “worldly” dimension, it affirms the “intellectual and spiritual outlook” that he recognized in Kazimir Malevich’s art. The references to the founder of Suprematism are undeniable: Knifer was introduced to abstraction in the 1950s by one of Malevich’s Croatian students, Djuro Tiljak, before coming face-to-face with his works during a trip to Amsterdam in 1962. This was in the midst of a Malevich revival prompted by European and international Spatialism, the ZERO group, as well as Yves Klein, to whom Knifer’s blue meanders might be a discreet allusion. The memory of the painter of “pure immaterial sensibility” had just been revived by a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1971. But the members of Gorgona had already been in contact with him, as part of their ambition to forge strong ties with international artistic networks, from Piero Manzoni’s Azimut gallery in Milan to the New Tendencies group, formed in Zagreb in 1961.

The low profile of Knifer’s art is clearly no longer justified, not only because of the works’ intrinsic power, but also because of the contemporary exigency to create an unfettered history of art.
Arnauld Pierre

Courtesy of galerie frank elbaz

Through the works presented at Tila Barrena Gallery, I wanted to represent what surrounds me. Transforming what is outside in a protective space.

Instead of painting what is inside me inventing lines and characters.

All of us contain a world inside, now we are contained in a world in which we cannot go outside too much.

It is an intimate experience, not a show.
I am showing my personal space (home, studio, inner feelings) to mirror the individual private experience we all had, and bring it to the public space, albeit a private space like a gallery.

It is a simplified version, a home selfie in a home setting. An exploration of home. The way we are called to push the boundaries of the space we are confined in. I made it become a space where conflict is resolved. Make the surface as polished as possible, similar to a comic.

We are drawing ourselves anew, and our capacity to develop is challenged by this new confinement that no one was expecting.

“Cemented Sky” an exhibition by the young emerging Palestinian artist Yazan Abu Salameh that explores a geography with distant horizons and density of structures. A wall upon a wall and a concrete block over another, the melancholy of the urban environment, as a byproduct of military occupation, manifests in Abu Salameh’s artworks. They emit ambivalence of feelings, self reflection and irony combined with an overwhelming presence of concrete, not only as a form but also as a subject and metaphor.

Living in Bethlehem and encountering the Israeli Apartheid Wall, the endless concrete road blocks, watch towers, checkpoints…etc., have had an apparent effect on Abu Salameh’s artistic approach. The Israeli restriction have also pushed Palestinians to build vertically resulting in tall and dense concrete residential tower blocks, and an ever shrinking connection with nature and open spaces.

Abu Salameh titles three of his artworks: “Decedents of Men in the Sun”, in a gesture to Ghassan Kanafani’s novel “Men in the Sun”. These artworks are a come back on the theme of the novel infused of the irony of modern times. The tall Apartheid Wall blocks the road in front of the van carrying a tank that leaks blood in the street; kids play atop of an old abandoned tank and in the background the blue skies overlap with the reality of the tall Apartheid Wall; A van speeds towards an empty horizon leaving shadows behind.

Even though, the concrete prompts an inevitable feeling of a grim presence, yet reading into the artworks, there is a call by the artist for emancipation; or a suggestion of change. In “Abandoned Horse”, the artist draws on Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, “Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?” referring to resistance. In the series “Empty Uprising”, Abu Salameh deconstructs the iconic image of an Intifada child throwing a stone. He focuses on the child, the stone and a series of slogans in the background praising Palestine, the nation, and revolution. Abu Salameh also focuses on high rise buildings putting them in a “Gift Box” or burry them in the ground– in “Burried City” as a way of rejecting what has become of the Palestinian towns as a result of occupation.

Abu Salameh uses a variety of mediums (paper, cement, lego blocks, cardboard… etc) yet in almost all of his artworks there is a kind of signature: a circular line. The circle acts sometimes as a magnifying glass, and some other times, it seems to stress on a detail or point to the focal point on the canvas, from the artist perspective; a sunflower partly colored, an egg in front of a rooster, a satellite dish on a roof of a partly constructed house, the last four men in a long queue walking aimlessly, a falling part of the Apartheid Wall, a skeleton of a swimming fish…etc.

In Cemented Sky, Abu Salameh uses Lego blocks and concrete in a series of artworks that draw on the contrast in color and textures, childhood or dreams and reality. In fact, they are an extension to the theme in his other series of paperwork. They bring to the mind a hue of childhood dreams and the sense of the rough context of dreaming. As if a colorful dream of future is trying to take over the grim reality represented by concrete.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

It may happen that Poet and Photographer meet at first in the course of their activity, that is in the truth of an instant captured by word or image, and then, also, because they have followed a similar path, where departure is linked to return, wandering to staying, both having left the same country and having chosen to reside in the same foreign city, which they have made their own.

The one and the other thus share a double genealogy, at least on a spiritual plane, and feel in their flesh the interweaving threads of East and West, while their eyes can adapt as easily to northern as to southern light. They are confronted around the world with places that provide them with inspiration and a perception of the subject (in order to photograph, to write) without any interference obscuring the link to the native country. In simple terms, the suspension of a feeling of belonging is followed by the proper distance for a critical dialogue with the native place.

And, although it is removed, such a native horizon, whatever one may think, remains that of choice and preference. As much as one may have accumulated visions arising out of a hundred climates traversed by the nomadic artist or poet, nothing in the myth can succeed in obliterating the saffron dust that rises at every step from the scene of childhood or from the floor behind the scenes other than those steps on the hinterland, that prolong it.

So it is a question of paradise. And the context does not oblige me to ask the ritual question, that is whether such a paradise is lost or if it lasts forever. Simply, this paradise proposes the adherence to a pact which consists in making one’s own the art of giving account in the midst of the alternating play of presence and absence, between what fades away and what emerges, between what perishes and what persists. Often the childhood scene is circumscribed, it becomes one with a space that is limited, reduced to sensations and emotions, to scents, sights, sounds, associated with a house, a courtyard, a street, a square, a neighbourhood, a town, a shoreline or even with the different levels and areas of an urban settlement and of the surrounding countryside. There will always be, on the periphery or at the extremities, recesses and margins that elude the knowledge we have of the native country, precluded from the experience that populates the childhood scene,that which remains essential in the making of the myth without which there can be neither the vision nor the writing. We shall see that this initial ignorance can be precious for a widening of the field, one which opens up deposits of a reserve from which it is possible to draw out the terms destined to remould both the myth of childhood and the native pact. 

It would be tempting moreover to think that the best solution would be to leave the childhood scene forever and nourish oneself on whatever has been internalised according to the whims of constructions and deconstructions, of redeployments and restorations, by the fertile visitations of scraps, fragments, traces, vestiges, suppliers of situations and faces, dramas and characters, that are subjected to the law of displacement, in between substitutions and sublimation.
But how can a man be in accord with that which he carries inside himself when he returns regularly to the real place where the origins of the inner landscape lie? The transformation of the place instills a renewed strangeness with regard to that which is familiar.

And amidst the constant comings and goings, you finish up no longer following the stations of pilgrimage, you no longer update the catalogue of ruins and transformations. Returning from exile, and inspecting what remains of the realm, you no longer even try to imagine the transfiguration of forms which inhabit a space that has been subjected to change without soliciting your participation. In this way, there you find yourself a stranger twice over: first, I repeat, the place has not waited for you before undergoing its transformations ; secondly, the network of signals that signposts the approach awakens in you neither approbation nor connivance: does it not direct the senses towards an iconography that is illustrated and defended by a class of guardians and priests to which you don’t belong and which labours to substitute an official imagery for the reality of the country, one which clashes with the truth of the myth that you carry living deep down, in the labyrinths of exile ?

Since the ancient signs are eroding, being damaged, disintegrating; since, by their very nature, new forms can’t be shown ; since it is impossible to turn them into signs (at the very most they conform to the economy of the signal that can neither be the remedy nor the necessary stimulant for the preservation of meaning); all that remains is to quit the shore and the home port in order to continue our wanderings in search of meaning through the enlarged landscape of myth all the while remaining within the tracks and itineraries that fall within the frontiers of the native country where, in a plurality of accents, the love of one language is shared.

And it will be by appropriating the inner strangeness that the myth of belonging will be revived in its very relativity.
Before leaving the shore, the photographer exploits the possibilities it offers. His choice indicates in passing that he travelled up and down the maritime front from east to west, north to south, and that his gaze was retained only by those stopping-places that escape from conventional and somewhat obligatory imagery.
What has been fixed by the photographer would certainly not serve as an advert to sell sunshine, not even the chatty notice which proposes to some foreign passenger to make himself at home, precisely targeting his identity, through a message correctly expressed in his language : the happy anthropological denial appears on all sides, as much in the medium as in the forms surrounding it like the personnel who give him their support.

And the other retained images offer only relics which are not true to the label of the sunshine-factory : to a few remnants of structures on piles immersed in water where algae agglutinate into masses ; to the derisory traces of a child’s game produced without purpose by the chance encounter with scaffolding on which hangs a sign high up, imitating the apprenticeship of the pictorial act ;to this add scenes which recall the continuity of certain arts and certain archaic and magic practices, such as the sign which refers to falconry, or the vapours that veil the bodies around the boiling-hot spring, or again the visit of holy men to a secluded mausoleum, falling into decay at the end of what is locally perceived as a promontory, far behind the disused port, enclosed by the lagoon, surrounding on the northern side the mouth of the greatest wadi that crosses the territory from west to east.
And even the most well-known place-names are subverted by an insignificant subject that is wary of the spectacular and refuses to pick up the smallest sign of recognition.
Sometimes, the place resists this erasing of recognition, either by a certain something creating its atmosphere, or by the ostentatious manifestation of one of its archaeological remains which, moreover, had to be retained, as an exception, only because of an ambivalence which would assimilate it to some Roman work : it is probably the monumental dimensions that maintain such an ambivalence ; as for the shape of the broken arch, it indicates uncontestably the islamic profile of the Fatimid arch.
The strategy of subversion is verified elsewhere: as in the holy city where the photographer does not seek to throw a different light onto the often represented scene: he turns away from the monumental in order to offer only a single shot taken on the level of vernacular architecture. The eye is caught by a pair of earthernware bowls left on the threshold of a mihrab divided by the curve and counter-curve of a line of shadow, mark of a fleeting hour, a privilege that fixes the ephemeral while recalling at the instant of its recording the dividing line of the Yin/Yang vortex.

Very soon in his itinerary, the photographer turns his back to the sea, he enters the interior of the country. The territories through which he roams are those of the plateau, the steppe and the desert. At the heart of these expanses, the photographer remains vigilant, he makes no concessions, he bypasses the areas which are set up there to systematise the despised imagery. The discourse which this imagery spreads turns into a noise that pierces the hearing and perturbs calm listening. Furthermore, an agent of uniformisation remains, eating away at the domains of internal otherness.

The photographer lingers in the vast and empty spaces which make the word precious and rare. Around his retreat prowls the vow of silence.
Is it not said that throughout depopulated landscapes destined to deepen the act of listening to silence, one plans the staging of a crime?
Faced with these views of emptiness (which subtle marks barely distinguish from the commonplace, that is to sag, from everywhere and nowhere), some kind of alchemy forces me to leave the logic of the land that I people with figures come from elsewhere. I see Oedipus in his various stages and ages.
I see his shadow, before the crime, tread the steppe in juvenile impetuosity, fleeing the oracle’s prediction, at the crossroads, hesitating between the wags ; I see his ghost, after the crime, a blind, staggering old man, a stranger, banished and cursed, in search of a land that will receive his remains ; I see him bound to the sacred stone, near death, already sanctified even before his dissolution into the secret of the gods.

Perhaps this imaginary presence was evoked by the emergence of a Latin inscription engraved on a lintel half-buried in the loose earth, and which is a reminder, among so many other remains, that the soil of the fatherland, the patrie (I use patrie deliberately, coming from patri(ae), a word partly visible on a fragment of white marble, part of one of the points of time fixed by the photographer) participated in the culture of ancient tragedy. In order to wake the land from the forgetfulness in which it sleeps, and which separates it from tragic emotion, shouldn’t we reanimate the echo of the dead word that is recorded in the memory of the stones, at least where the theatres are, or what is still left standing there, between the stagefronts and the tiers that are raised on terraced arches or dug out of the hillside?

In the desert there is no need to bring in imaginary figures. The images which are offered to let us enter this territory are filled with the very people who live there. It is here that frontality is established and an accord with the image preserved by convention is accepted: how can I explain such a change of strategy if not by the fact that this space must be both that which is strangest to the photographer and that which resists, most remarkably, the despised imagery?
There is a kind of fraternity rediscovered through these up-front frank presences of men and women, young and old, self-assured and discreet, giving themselves up to the trust of an eye that places and appraises; perhaps this shared giving ought to carry on as a kind of hymn, offered to the last splendours of two survivals, the nomads and the Berbers, whose future extinction would contribute to the impoverishment of a land no longer able to register the ancestral closeness of the simple gestures which link the shepherd to the new-born lamb, which by assimilation give the camel driver the face of his animal, which extends the person of a man into the land he tills.

Thus in the desert the photographer best harmonizes the alternation of emptiness with population. In paying off the debt to the native country, by such an enlargement of its horizons, he could not refrain from making his testimony by the miracle of the garden : instead of his offering a succession of columns and a series of naves and aisles, he presents us with the contours of a mosque as its shadow falls across the rows of tall trunks and the falling curves of the palm leaves that join together and suggest an outline of the forthcoming arch.
Faced with the injuries and damage undergone by the childhood scene, it is these strange things, offered and appropriated, that have led the photographer to provisionally pay off the debt that is claimed by the native pact. He can thus obtain further respite to go on roaming the countries of the world with the freedom granted by the certitude of a realm that the country grants when it is revisited, reconsidered, redisplayed throughout its territories, according to the choices, the urgencies, imposed on you by the contingencies of being alive.

The Logic of the Land
Abdelwahab Meddeb, Paris, September 1997

We enter this exhibition as we would enter a dream peopled by beings of strange ancestry. Their presence bears witness to alchemical tales and it murmurs the charred secrets of a land marked by a great nocturnal sun.

The ceramics of Souraya Haddad Credoz are to be read as creatures born of a universe dormant within us, an environment both familiar and not yet formed. Open to individual readings and interpretations, they offer the possibility of symbiotic futures, promising a history, a temperament, a role, all born of a desire for worlds reinvented.

These creatures, both organic and mineral, make short shrift of what is natural, baroque and artificial. These pieces are representational only in so far as they transfigure possible realities and induce visionary impressions. The play of their presence indeed triggers the imagination, leading deep into the subconscious mind and the images it projects.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat, The Upper Gallery

Green Art Gallery presents a group show featuring works by Jaber Al Azmeh, Afra Al Dhaheri, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan and Seher Shah.

Afra Al Dhaheri’s work is rooted in her experiences growing up in Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE – a place of recent and rapid change. Working across various mediums, she draws out notions of time and adaptation, rigor and fragility.

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan integrates metaphors from local myths and historic and iconographic elements of different geographies to open up new narrative scopes. She locates the figure of the Other between the twinned spectres of absence and invisibility in order to weave connections between identity, memory, space and time.

Seher Shah’s practice uses experiences from the field of art and architecture to think about space, landscape, objects and aesthetics through drawing, printmaking and sculpture. In recent years her work has been concerned with the language of drawing and how to represent an experiential nature of space. The relationships within perspective drawings, the aesthetics of architecture, and materiality within drawing and sculpture are some of the preoccupations in her practice. Her work draws through scale shifts between the individual to architecture, personal memory to collective historical events, and the transformation of symbols and spaces

Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, The Architecture of Confinement is the second chapter of the exhibition trilogy “The Architecture of…”, conceived for BNKR in Munich. BNKR is housed in a former WWII air-raid bunker, and each of the three parts relates directly to different episodes in the evolving history of the exhibition building from 1940 until today. The first one, titled The Architecture of Deception, referenced the building’s external camouflage residential features, and was on view from March 2020 until April 2021. The trilogy will conclude with The Architecture of Transformation later this year, exploring the building’s current use as a mixed residential and exhibition space.

The Architecture of Confinement is the second chapter of this trilogy, and takes its conceptual cue from the building’s usage as an internment camp during the denazification policy period from 1945 to 1948. At the same time, it evokes the current global experience of isolation. Six artists relate to the exhibition concept through existing or commissioned works. A site-specific installation by Nadia Kaabi-Linke references the architecture of imprisonment. Özgür Kar‘s video installation shows the effects of isolation on the individual. In her photographic works, Joanna Piotrowska examines the complex relationship between the human body and its physical environment. A sculpture by Mona Hatoum playfully tackles the interdependence of two closely connected individuals. Ramzi Ben Sliman‘s film is a reflection on art as a means of transcending the confines of socio-economic boundaries. A new work by Annika Kahrs, specifically commissioned for this exhibition explores the connections between space and sound in a period of isolation.

A comprehensive archives wall, which is presented at the center of the exhibition, complements the featured artistic positions. It illustrates both the historical context of the original use of the building as a bunker during the Second World War, as well as its importance in the post-war period, and the conversion of the architecture into its current state. The exhibition is conceived as a dialogue between the featured artistic positions, the confined architecture of the exhibition space, and the history of the building. Through creating a holistic experience, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the effects of physical and social restrictions, and their impact on the individual.

Participating artists : Ahmed Yaser, Mahmoud Qabil, Marwa Atwa, Rawan Abbas and Sara Ayman.

“We sit down… every night in our small garden, just five seats as if the world is void around us, contemplating what surrounds us in our daily routine, watching the swing in confusion… Is it swaying in response to the wind or are we sharing someone else’s fun time in parallel universe, looking at the lemon trees and asking? How does it give us its fruits so easily, if it were for us, we wouldn’t present anything for free. We forget our coffee as usual until we it became a habit to enjoy it as cold, joking with each other about whether coffee is originally a hot drink or are we are the ones that choose to drink it that way in a touch of rush, the simplest things in our garden are very complicated, as it is within ourselves”.

Courtesy of Mashrabia Gallery Of Contemporary Art

Galerie Tanit, hors-les-murs, in Starco Center will remain open and bring interesting interventions by our artists.
Chafa Ghaddar will invest the space to show a new series of frescoes;

CACTI IN A DAYDREAM

Cobalt blue is on my mind.
This desire to paint and spend time with colour is becoming more and more voracious.
When did I need colour that much?
When did I miss feeling that ecstatic?
Painting is magical, tricky and revealing.
Painting with frescoes is even euphoric.
Frescoes are unashamed.
In cacti I bloomed.
A sweet celebration of resilience and daydreaming.
I retained my spine and my waters.
Thick skin and dissolving soul.
I kept fantasizing.
I kept growing.

Courtesy of Galerie Tanit.