Agenda

Mamut Art Project 2020 kicks off its online platform and on-site exhibition at its brand new venue Yapı Kredi bomontiada on Tuesday, October 27. With a focus on discovering independent creatives across Turkey and providing an exhibition platform, Mamut Art Project has provided portfolio days, professional development consultancy and supported networking between artists and art professionals for the past 8 years. This year the exhibition will showcase the works of 49 artists selected from over 1,500 applications.

Yapı Kredi bomontiada plays a leading role in collaborative and participatory commissions and has provided a dynamic platform for innovative artists from all disciplines since its inception. Hosting this year’s edition of Mamut Art Project, a comprehensive system of protective measures has been put in place for a reformatted exhibition programme,whereby visitors are invited to an artist’s loft set up.The visits will be conducted by appointment and free of charge.

For the first time this year, Mamut Art Project offers an online platform for its 8th edition comprising a diverse selection of nearly 400 works by 49 artists, bringing art audiences and artists together in a variety of formats on its website, and social media channels. Functioning as an archive for Mamut artists, the website mamutartproject.com will create access to the artist’s works, provide free consultancy services for visitors and in the future develop into an international platform connecting Mamut artists with art lovers all around the globe.

Courtesy of Mamut Art Project.

Gazelli Art House is pleased to present Jann Haworth’s exhibtion Mannequin Defectors. Haworth’s March Set from 2017 will be on view at Gazelli Art House. These works trace the experiences of the Women’s March that took place that year, using cardboard as her chosen medium to reflect the protest signs carried by many. With this series, Haworth challenges the status quo of expected compositions and embraces the diptych format while asking viewers to consider the accuracy of their own memories. Haworth depicts alternatives to the images created in the minds of others, which is echoed in her arrangements and styles.

Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.

Casa Árabe and PHotoEspaña jointly present NUR, an open call for applications for a photography exhibition that will be displayed at Casa Árabe’s premises as part of the 24th PHotoESPAÑA International Photography Festival, within its official programme, to be held in 2021.

The aim of this open call is to promote and publicise a project that looks at one or several aspects of Arabic societies, from a contemporary curatorial perspective. The call seeks to reward attempts to innovate, while conveying current content that have to do with the realities of the contemporary Arab world. This content is presented in a manner which is deliberately open and non-restrictive as regards subject matter, so that a wide range of diverse initiatives can be accommodated, without limitations as regards to the content, approaches or working techniques, and so that projects focused on a single artist or projects of a collective nature can be submitted.

The call is aimed at curators or institutions, who have demonstrable prior experience and who submit an exhibition project which complies with the guidelines outlined here.

All projects will be reviewed and evaluated by the organisation, which reserves the right not to admit those that do not meet the requirements of the call.

The jury, made up of three experts from the fields of photography and cultural cooperation with the Arab world, will select one exhibition proposal from all the entries received.

The selected project will be on public display in the form of an exhibition at Casa Árabe’s Madrid premises (c/ Alcalá, 62) in June 2021, as part of the 24th PHotoEspaña Festival, with the possibility of it being shown at a later date at Casa Árabe’s premises in Córdoba (c/ Samuel de los Santos y Gener, 9).

The deadline is extended until 14 March 2021

For more information, you can visit the webs of Casa Árabe or PHotoESPAÑA, or directly download the bases of the call at this link (SPANISH, ENGLISH, FRENCH and ARABIC versions)

Fann A Porter Dubai is pleased to present Works on Paper, an exhibition of drawings by Juri Morioka, Zeina Salameh, Houssam Ballan, Omar Najjar and Majd Kurdieh from 12 January – 28 February 2021 at gallery located at The Workshop Dubai, with an opening reception on Tuesday, 12 January, at 7pm.

The presented works explore the intimate yet primordial nature of paper drawing. The pieces allow the viewer to engage and experience the artists processes in an exceptionally close manner. The exhibition aims to celebrate drawings as basis to the artist’s practice but as a most fundamental form of artistic expression.

Celebrated New York based Japanese artist Juri Morioka’s ‘Landscapes from other Dimensions’ is a new series of paper works made using pencil, water-based pigments, 24K Kanazawa gold and crushed semi-precious gems. The nature inspired abstract works invites the viewer to experience a sense of belonging, where artist shares the belief that everything has a life of its own and a story to tell. Born in Tokyo, Japan, Morioka spent a year at the University of Toledo before moving to New York City where she earned a BFA in painting at Parsons School of Design in 1990. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, Morioka has exhibited her paintings in galleries and museums across the U.S., Europe and Asia. Since her works were first introduced in Dubai in 2005, they have been showcased in galleries throughout the UAE.

Zeina Salameh is a visual artist and creative graphic designer whose artwork takes the form of etching, lithography, silkscreen, linocuts, monotype, printmaking, installation, and video art.The artist graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts – University of Damascus, Graphics and Printmaking Department in 2000. She has been part of many humanitarian organisations through voluntarily educational workshops of fine arts. She is also a brand strategist and creative consultant for businesses. Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1979, Zeina Salameh lives and works in Dubai. She has participated in group exhibitions and workshops within the Middle East and Japan.

At the center of Houssam Ballan’s work is the idea that representation cannot solely be based on what one sees, but the understanding of what one is seeing and the feelings it invokes in a person – be it through looking at it from different angles, touching it, allowing it to move you subconsciously, as well as other experiential interactions. Ballan takes a large focus on research and the exploration of these ideas within his practice, providing his works with a strong theoretical base. His works on paper, often using ink, charcoal, or markers are informed from this research. Born in 1983 in Sweida, Syria, Ballan was part of the 13th Cairo Biennale, Cairo (2019). Ballan has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including BBA Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2019); Hafez Gallery, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2019); Manara Arts & Culture, Jordan (2019); Atelier Stories, Paris, France (2018); Fann A Porter, Dubai, UAE (2020, 2019, 2018), Mark Hachem Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2014); Arab Cultural Centre (2010, 2007, and 2005); Ayyam Gallery, Damascus, Syria (2006); French Cultural Centre, Damascus, Syria, (2004); among others. His works can be found in numerous private and public collections.

Omar Najjar is known for his innovative style that he describes as “structured chaos.” Presented in this exhibition are Najjar’s latest pastel on paper works that continue his modern take on impressionism; their quotidian subject matter is elevated to the sublime, providing a profound, if understated, view of the human experience. Born in 1992 in Nablus, Palestine, Omar Najjar graduated from the Jordan University’s Fine Arts Department. The artist group and solo exhibitions include The artist group and solo exhibitions include BBA Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2019), Manara Arts & Culture, Amman, Jordan (2020, 2019), Bahrain Art Fair (2019); Zara Gallery, Amman, Jordan (2018), Wadi Finan, Amman, Jordan (2016); Al Bareh Gallery, Bahrain (2016); Fann A Porter, Dubai, UAE (2015); Nabad Art Gallery, Amman, Jordan (2014). Omar Najjar’s works are housed in various private and public institutions including the Palestine Museum, USA.

Majd Kurdieh’s practice incorporates painting, drawing, and literature using recurring figures that stand to tell a story, usually carrying a strong moral and positive reinforcement that the artist projects into the world. The artist has created a ‘cast of characters’, the two main ones being the Fasaeen (Arabic for ‘tiny ones’). The stories told through the representation of these figures are not specific stories that the artist references but rather ones that could apply to any viewer, leaving room for personal interpretation. The Fasaeen, one boy (Fasoon) and one girl (Fasooneh), always smiling despite the fact their world is filled with hardships, are usually accompanied by other characters. Featured in this exhibition are selection of ink on paper works, part of artist’s series ‘Hold onto the Flower’. Born in Aleppo, Syria in 1985, Kurdieh has featured in solo and group exhibitions at Azad Art Gallery, Cairo (2020), Egypt Art Fair, (2020), BBA Gallery, Berlin (2019), Manara Arts & Culture, Jordan (2020, 2019); Fann-A-Porter, Dubai (2019, 2018, 2016), El-Sawy Culture Wheel, Cairo (2019), and Athar Al Farasheh, Aleppo (2011), Sikka Art Fair, Dubai (2018) and Art Bahrain, Manama (2019, 2018). His works are housed in public and private collections in the Middle East and abroad, including HE Dr. Zaki Nusseibeh’s private collection and Atassi Foundation.

Courtesy of Fann A Porter Dubai

Tashkeel is proud to present ‘A Terranean Love Note’, a solo exhibition by the artist Mays Albaik. The exhibition is a culmination of Albaik’s year-long research and development on the Critical Practice Programme 2020 at Tashkeel with mentors Ala Younes and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Through spatial interventions, sculpture and video work, ‘A Terranean Love Note’ explores moments of contact between the self and placehood – constructed sites of physical residence, digital spaces or ancestral homelands. The works triangulate body, language and space by layering a personal poetics onto the social politics that define our relationship to geography.

Mays Albaik’s early practice developed out of the oral narration of her family’s history, the story of her grandfather’s exile from Palestine, and the winding path through geopolitical and cultural landscapes that led to where she is now; a non-citizen resident of her country of birth. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a B.Arch from the American University of Sharjah. An alumna of Salama Emerging Artist Fellowship (SEAF), she has participated in exhibitions including ‘Qala 0.8900’ (Darat Al Funun, Jordan); ‘Before We Were Banned’ (Helix Art Gallery, Brooklyn, New York); ‘Sawt 2a’ (Grey Noise, Dubai); ‘Mind the Gap’ (Tashkeel, Dubai), and ‘Change Coordinates + Someone Else’ (1971 Design Space, Sharjah).

Courtesy of Tashkeel.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels is honoured to present the new solo exhibition Black Fruit by Lu Chao after Black Light, in 2016, which took place at the Parisian gallery.

London-based Chinese artist Lu Chao (b. 1988) studied oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (China) until 2012. Under the tutorship of the internationally renowned realist painter Liu Xiaodong, the artist learned to connect one’s art practice to real life. Lu Chao continued his studies at the Painting Department at the Royal College of Art in London (UK), where he graduated in 2014 and received the Painter-Stainers Goron Luton Award. Being a London-resident for seven years now, the artist divides his time between London and Beijing.

Lu Chao’s work is best known for his large-scale black oil paintings depicting miniature crowds of people in surreal settings. The artist consistently portrays a crowd to question the relationship between the individual and his environment that underlies man’s insignificance in relation to the vastness of our universe, the great unknown. Through poetic renders, Lu Chao evokes a void to interrogate these existential philosophical topics, embedded in the Chinese Zen Buddhism where emptiness does not stand for ‘nothingness’, but on the contrary means ‘everything that we cannot see’.

In the new body of work Black Fruit the mysterious is ever present. In sixteen compositions crowds are represented in the form of fruits, cakes, chemical particles or as funambulists creating a fantastical imagery. When viewed up close, the facial expressions of the many small-sized figures reveal both the resilience and the many upheavals experienced by humanity.

The solemn use of ‘ivory black’ paint in his artistic practice is inspired by the historical Chinese landscape paintings of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, where the artists used only black ink to create an alternating play of light and hues that was considered as ‘colours’. This tonality in black gives structure to the image. In it, Lu Chao is constantly exploring new ways to expand his graphic and technical possibilities in his chosen visual language.

The largest painting in the show Dark Energy No.4 (2020) bears witness to the influence of traditional Chinese ink painting and the artist’s play with scale, in particular the dark vast landscape with what appears to be a giant ‘’Penjing” bonsai tree in the forefront completely eclipsing the ant-sized figures on the grounds. Inspired by Taoism, with its belief in the power of nature, this scene attempts to represent the dark energy that surrounds us and still eludes our comprehension, to bring to the fore the unconscious reality of humanity.

A great admirer of Chinese philosophy, Lu Chao has also immersed himself in Western ideology since moving to London in 2013, supplemented by visits to exhibitions by his favorite Western masters, notably Rembrandt, Lucian Freud, Goya and Francis Bacon.

Works such as the depicted ruin in Relic No.7 (2020) or the apocalyptic scene of Circulation No.2 (2020) are inspired by the European Romanticism, while the work Babel (2020) makes a direct allusion to the Tower of Babel by the Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder which evokes the sin of hubris. 
Moreover, his work has affinities with modern human science, such as in the Funambulist series reminiscent of the string figures of the American theorist Donna Haraway, where the dynamics of thought are stimulated to produce new connections and alliances.

Despite the artist’s oath to solemnly use black paint in his artistic practice, Lu Chao includes in every exhibition a work of colour. In this show three works have been composed in Van Gogh’s blue. Strongly influenced by Vincent van Gogh’s painting Almond Blossoms (1890), Lu Chao used a similar light blue to convey a kind of awakening and beauty. The large work entitled Black Fruit (2020) is completely covered in shades of blue, highlighting the intriguing subject of tree branches producing bodiless heads as fruits.

Interested in the enigmatic meaning of human life, Lu Chao’s paintings are like uncanny dreams that reflect on human existence. Dominated by an increasingly daring use of black, the artist creates a body of work where content and form go hand in hand, each reinforcing. The artist’s work goes beyond a mere amalgamation of Chinese and Western codes, which are much more complex and sophisticated in their tendency to raise multiple questions, both philosophical and socio-cultural.

“The Black Fruit is the 7th solo exhibition in black series after Black Forest, 2013, Black Mirror, 2015, Black Light, 2016, Black Box, 2017, Black Silence, 2017, Black Dots, 2019. One of the clues that clearly connects all the exhibitions is “Ivory black”. The possibility of black dots is infinite. If the black dot is considered as a seed, the black fruit will breed from there. The fruit has different life cycles and different tastes, which metaphors human beings ourselves. Every moment affects our emotions, just like the taste of fruit, we can feel soft, hard, juicy, dry, sweet, sour, bitter, astringent… Above all, the fruit is not always sweet, but a complex. The fruit has a life cycle. It comes, breeds, and goes. When life comes to an end, glory disappears. “

Lu Chao, October 2020

Forum Gallery presents its first exhibition of works by Claudio Bravo (1936 – 2011), whose estate the Gallery now represents. The exhibition of paintings, pastels and drawings includes works exhibited publicly for the first time in the United States.

In his catalogue essay, Art in America contributing editor David Ebony writes, “Gifted with technical virtuosity, Bravo commands a seemingly effortless sleight-of-hand to enthrall viewers in unexpected ways. Like a modern-day alchemist, he manages to transform everyday objects and ordinary subjects into something inimitable, rarified and extraordinary. Even his most austere and nearly abstract compositions can inspire awe in their transcendental allure”.

Claudio Bravo was a painter of colour and light. It was the extraordinary light of Morocco that drew Bravo to the country where he lived from 1972 until his passing in 2011. He used this light to propel his art, rendering, in his still life paintings, objects from his own collections and his everyday life that he carefully arranged in the light to focus on their enigmatic meaning. His gift for economy and nuance served his interest in evoking an emotional response rather than creating a mere depiction. In the Forum Gallery exhibition, Moroccan Fans, 1994; Ritual Stones, 1997; Camel and Lamb Skins, 2004; and Yellow Marjana, 2008; are imbued with the harmonious colour and spectacular light that set Claudio Bravo’s still lifes apart.

Inspired by the paintings of Mark Rothko and Antoni Tàpies, Claudio Bravo began painting the palpable textures and subtle colours of paper and fabric in the early 1960’s, and these subjects became the best-known of his works, remaining popular throughout the world during his lifetime and beyond. The exhibition includes Three Aluminum Papers, 2010, and Red Cloth, 2011, Claudio Bravo’s last completed painting, a majestic, luxurious work over six feet tall, to be exhibited for the first time.

The earliest painting in the Forum Gallery exhibition is the haunting Nude Male Leaning on Column, 1979, recalling the Artist’s stay in New York City from 1969 to 1972. An important example of Bravo’s figurative mastery, the silent, ethereal drama in this work is emblematic of Claudio Bravo, who said he owed much to Velázquez.

Often celebrated as a consummate draughtsman, Claudio Bravo worked on paper as well as canvas throughout his career, and his pastels and drawings are among his most sensitive works. The shimmering colour of the pastels and the depth and beauty of the drawings in the exhibition are exemplified by the pastels Green Sofa, 1991, and Opening the Door, 1991, and the drawings Two Heads and Hands, 1983, and Said, 1995, as well as the rare still life drawing of Engines, 2008.

Claudio Bravo was recognised with fourteen one-person museum exhibitions in the US, Chile, Mexico and France during his lifetime. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany, the Museum Boijmans Van Beurugen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; and many more throughout the world. Claudio Bravo was chosen to represent Chile in the Venice Biennale in 2007.

Courtesy of Forum Gallery NY

Mashrabia Gallery presents “A sketch is a sketch is a sketch”, a solo Exhibition by George Bahgory.

How many exhibitions did Bahgory during his long career? It is impossible to know exactly, but this one is supposed to be the very last one while the artist is still alive. Could we believe that?

This captivating exhibition would like to pay homage to the ingenious artist and his career. Drawing being an integral part of who he is, Bahgory throughout his life couldn’t detain himself from drawing – like a magnificent obsession – his everyday surroundings, whether it was a beautiful scenery or at his everyday cafe.

Divided in different sections ranging from portraits to nudes to streets scenes, this exhibition stresses the ability of Bahgory to create a whole world through a mere simple black line. Colours add to the compositions a touch of sensuality, recalling the freedom of expression which has characterised his entire production.

Courtesy of Mashrabia Gallery

Until the time is right the only way to preserve what we discover is to bury it under the sand…

Early in 1920, British troops digging trenches around the Euphrates River discovered a fresco in their camping area. The following archaeological expeditions unearthed Dura-Europos, later known as the “Pompeii of the Syrian desert,” which was lost from sight for seventeen centuries. An area of interest and research for artist Barış Doğrusöz since 2017, the Locus of Power trilogy examines the culture as well as the economic and political history of the ancient city located in Deir ez-Zor. Presented for the first time as part of The Sequential program, the multimedia installation based on the reconstruction of the site looks at the aesthetics of ruins, representation and rereading of colonial discourse on the basis of museology and archeology.

The first video of the trilogy, Sandstorm and the Oblivion (2017) traces the siege, decline and unearthing of the city, which was originally named Dura, meaning “fortress” by its first inhabitants, and Europos by the Greeks. Doğrusöz contextualises the ruins somewhere between fact and fiction, scrutinising the act of digging in literal and figurative terms. Building on the reports by French and American archaeologists, satellite images and footage from within the city walls, the work registers the past and ongoing conflicts in these lands where excavations function as “instruments of soft power politics.”

Beneath Crowded Skies (2019) draws attention to the periodic sieges that the fortress town has been subjected to for centuries, whether through the scientific process or the military operations and militant attacks in the region over the past decade. The artist refers to the graffiti left by “natives and foreigners, soldiers and civilians who lived, loved, danced, laughed, traded, and fought in the Fortress,” inside and outside the buildings as in public and private spaces. The circular structure that he creates while compiling the information and the refrain included in the text allows him to construct a spiral of conflict and struggle linking ancient history to the present.

Completed in 2020 for The Sequential, Cross-Pollinated questions the observability of archaeological sites as a cultural heritage. Doğrusöz focuses on the footage of the Corona spy satellite, operated by the United States from 1959 to 1972 for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China as well as the West Asian territories where they were active at the time. The historic aerial and satellite images, which were declassified in 1992, document the destruction of the ancient city. The artist expands his research by pointing out the issues of water politics and energy resources, reclamation, urbanisation, wars, systematic looting and deliberate destruction, which all are decisive for the present-day conditions of the region.
Locus of Power by Doğrusöz, whose practice reconstructs and interprets the data defining the collective memory by exploring places, temporalities and systems that shape the narrative of history, is on view on floor -1 at SALT Galata until March 28. Online public programs to be organised in parallel to the presentation will be announced at saltonline.org.

* Excerpt from Sandstorm and the Oblivion (2017) as part of the Locus of Power video trilogy by Barış Doğrusöz
Featuring five independent presentations by Barış Doğrusöz, Deniz Gül, Volkan Aslan, Aykan Safoğlu, and the duo Fatma Belkıs & Onur Gökmen, The Sequential program will take place at SALT Galata throughout 2021.

Supported by SAHA, The Sequential will be included in the 2021-2022 public programs of three member institutions of L’Internationale—Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Warsaw) and M HKA, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Antwerp)—following the initial presentations at SALT Galata.

Courtesy of SALT Galata

Carbon 12 is enthusiastic to announce the group exhibition, À Bout de Souffle.

The exhibition includes artworks from artists Omar Barquet, Olaf Breuning, André Butzer, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Jojo Gronostay, Michael Sailstorfer, Sara Rahbar and Anahita Razmi.

We spend no time in between reminiscing and disremembering. With sights set towards the immediate future, we relinquish all notion of the present. Never remaining within the stillness of a moment. À Bout de Souffle (‘breathless’) is an exhibition that occurs and unfolds as a deconstruction of one, fleeting moment. In isolating a cinematic still, our feet grounded, the exhibition seamlessly flits in and out of the present moment, encouraging us to absorb, and to release.

As a bubble expands in size, with its iridescent walls shifting in endless lucid colours, the ever-growing anticipation of being suspended in tension only grows – the artworks from the exhibition drift between various states of calm and calamity. Jojo Gronostay’s artwork frames the hand of a street vendor, barely grasping ropes connected to blankets that serve as displays for fake designer products. Through capturing a transient state, a moment in transit, he juxtaposes conflicting elements of calm and chaos.

Anahita Razmi’s video installation focuses on hand movements and technological devices, composing a new choreography using stock footage videos of scrolling hands and fingers. Razmi explores and searches for new ways of navigation by reframing these gestures or motions that are seemingly intuitive and internalised by applying a new “non-fitting”, “exotic”, sonic connection to them. Razmi draws a relation to musical instruments – tapping, plucking, scrolling: How are we touching a touch screen? How are we touching a drum or a string instrument?

Witnessing a scene unravel and spiral out of control before you. A buildup becomes a knot in your stomach, not untangling. Almost dangling, Omar Barquet’s sculptural work hangs in a corner, suspended by a delicate thread. The pristine nature of the object, with its sharp, sweeping curves as a harsh contrast to its materially reflective surface, builds an almost palpable tension with its most subtle swaying. This tension only just escapes us – from its striking resemblance to that of a guillotine, to the elegance of its own movement.

Sara Rahbar’s War series (2008-2010) is a reflection on the global sociopolitical context of our times. Her textile-based assemblage, overridden with predominantly military objects – bullets, pickaxes, horse bridles – their brusque material portions splayed and sectioned in a surgical manner. Their arrangement translates an inherent, deep-seated feeling of dread, tightly bundled together and yet, vividly exposed.

Within André Butzer’s N-Paintings (2010–2017), he focuses on a gradual intensification of pictorial means. “N” is an imaginary destination, wherein he encapsulates the concept of a non-place that resides as a frequency on the edge of annihilation. Emphasised by an interstice placed in relation to a plane full of colour, which Butzer explores to the maximum of its potential. The hue of dark light, as Butzer states, inhabits the plane so that the painting itself transforms into a source of light.

Caught in the continuous process of grasping and holding on to fear and tension, we must move on to the search for some semblance of light. Like tense posture and shoulders rigid, the act of exhaling is the final preparation for yet another state: calm. Gil Heitor Cortesão’s painting emanates a melancholy stillness, whilst simultaneously pulling the viewer into its surreal environment. Through his reverse-glass painting technique, Cortesão adds layers to the painting – despite its tranquility, the ambience suggests a slow approaching turbulence, a slow brewing darkness.

Michael Sailstorfer’s salt sculpture, titled I can hear you, is composed entirely of salt – when exposed to the elements, the salt undergoes a transformational process and disintegrates. The erosion process alludes to the very transience of nature, and harkens back to the essence of it all – to draw in a breath of air, and let go of it.

In hopes of going with the constant ebb and flow of daily life, in hopes of returning to regular cycles and systematic processes, we move forward – despite our own halting doubts and litany of questions. In this vein, Olaf Breuning’s humour is the forefront of his artistic practice, wherein his photographic work contains group of people have been transformed into expressionless objects, wearing only wearing paper bags over their heads and cardboard boxes on their hands, feet and torsos. Seeming to question their current predicament of being specifically arranged beside one another, they return to the situation at hand – why, in fact, are they there, with letters on their chests?

Breuning calls the bigger picture to mind through the title of the work itself: Can someone tell us why we are here?

Courtesy of Carbon 12

Ayyam Gallery is pleased to present Can You Keep a Secret? A solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by Afshin Pirhashemi.

In Afshin Pirhashemi’s work, black is symbol for the power that cloaks femininity, truth, militancy and a worldview in which the stakes are high. His monochrome register never loses its dimensionality, although primary colours have begun to seep in, as well as the sheen of poetic fragments.

The iconic women that populate Pirhashemi’s paintings like alter-egos – a recurring motif – are both alluring and forbidding, multiple and individual yet in this latest series, they have come into their own. Layered with different texts, their outlines stream into colours and forms, evading absolute capture. At times, they seem familiar, symbolic of the film industry and popular culture. Other times, they are imaginative – superheroes conjured by the artist. Often they appear as real characters, raw and terrifying. They bleed and write confessional texts. Both violence and seduction are always implicit in Pirhashemi’s paintings except this time, a vulnerability manifests, deepening his photorealistic approach and inciting untold stories.

Pirhashemi’s painterly strokes have evolved from precise figuration to transformation as his latest diptychs and triptychs evidence different takes on what could be the same image – drafts on the concept of negative and positive space. Perhaps this is what Pirhashemi draws from Pop art: the idea that within endless reproduction, change exists through an artistic imprint. This is where Afshin Pirhashemi differs from the long line of artists fascinated with the Coca-Cola bottle after Andy Warhol, and the level of intrigue embedded in this symbol of Americana.

His Coca Cola is never rendered in exactly the same way. Largely reduced to its classic, unchanging and ever-recognisable logo, Coca Cola is indicative of a certain opacity – its recipe for the past four decades kept a closely guarded secret – and yet it represents a brand that has inspired so many knock-offs and imitations.

Other American iconographies such as the flag and The White House remain as backdrops in this show – so does Coco Cola, except in one work, where it is foregrounded. Inside, a woman covers her eyes and there are painted tears that hint at ruptures in the painting. If the bottle reminds Pirhashemi of better times in Tehran, he also alludes to its sense of mystery, compulsion, duality, signs of global hegemony and the East- West divide.

Pirhashemi is a process-driven artist who works in series of paintings, depicting extremes and creating narrative environments of oppositions, where struggle and strength are made manifest. But he is also showcasing a certain abstract Romanticism, such as in his two crimson landscape paintings of cascading movement, female apparitions, disguise and reflection. As he continues to reinvent himself, his tableaux are dramatic vignettes that unravel in a palimpsest of past and present where more is revealed, and less is known.

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery.

Nebokeru is the first solo presentation of Stelios Kallinikou at Grey Noise, Dubai.

Stelios Kallinikou approaches photography as a spatially performative act. An archaeologist by training, he is interested in unearthing narratives of spaces which lie beyond words. He presents us with sequences of imagery, flowing into interlaced dialogues, whilst exploring the nexus between the narrative limitations of photography and consciousness. The photographic effect known as Bokeh has been defined as “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light”. The term comes from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze”, or boke-aji, meaning “blur quality”.

The exhibition title is derived from the Japanese verb Nebokeru denoting the actions or condition of someone who is half-asleep. Images appear mythological and archeologically proto-human, connecting something primordial to the present by way of narrativising the body’s connection with the earth. In an introspective, meditative pace, Kallinikou brings works together constructing a world serving as a speculative scenario, through which he can better envisage his relationship to politics of vision, challenging the ways in which such mechanisms influence our experience.

Courtesy of Grey Noise Gallery

Split Ends showcases a body of conceptual works by Afra Al Dhaheri that frame a liminal state of unlearning and readdressing. The cultural dichotomies of hair are framed throughout the exhibition simultaneously in both the understandings of hair through the domains of the public and private. The figure of the split end—that brittle fraying of a hair when it becomes too dry—encapsulates the time and space between the start and finish of a transformation, or between an ending and its separation into a new beginning.

The juxtaposition of the organic and inorganic, embody both strength and vulnerability. Rope mimics the delicate language of hair but also evokes processes of tying down, taming, and tidying. Concrete summons images of rigid architecture and cityscapes but here develops a softness, as well, adapting to the delicate intricacies of the human body. The Arabic title of the installation Fil Al Shaar, a cornerstone work in the exhibition, insinuates a playful liberation of hair. The architectural space delineated by its ropes that hang heavily from the ceiling is meant to be experienced in the body’s movement through it, felt in the paradoxically light intimacy of touch. In contrast, One at a Time showcases the delicacy, intricacy, and force found in the organic state of human hair. The act of taping down the collected hairs and straightening them insinuates the force of external factors, and the reality of its natural state. The work explores hair’s malleability as a cultural, public signifier of what is “presentable” but also its own inherent, material force of rebellion in its persistent return to a private, “natural” state.

Throughout the works presented, Al Dhaheri draws the viewer into the intimacy of binary oppositions to propose a third possibility introduced in her works. She reinterprets hardness as a delicate trait thereby negotiating the rigidity of architecture and the fluidity of its definitions. The artist’s manipulation of interior/exterior and public/private in her materials shows how social and cultural obligation can transform into new forms. In the liminal spaces found in the moments of separation that inaugurate metamorphoses, Al Dhaheri proposes new realities that allow time to seem both expansive and limited, making space for destruction and construction to coexist. In the time of these material processes, the arrival at one ending opens onto the chaos of a new beginning. Where there is absence and finality there lies, too, the opportunity for presence and transformation.

– Text by Munira Al Sayegh
Courtesy of Green Art Gallery

The Lacemaker is the third solo exhibition of Farhad Ahrarnia (b. 1971) at the gallery. Comprising images drawn from a diverse range of sources and media – the internet, printed or painted material, and composed with embroidery, painted metalwork and grooming items – the exhibition gives new insight into this Iran and UK based artist’s intriguing eclectic practice.

Role-playing and performance, the perception of surface and the notion that appearances are skin deep are recurrent themes in Ahrarnia’s work, here expressed in four distinct groups of Embroideries: faked portraits of Boko Haram brides depicting much older, attractive individuals in order to gain attention and sympathies; various white film actors in “Arab dress” portraying TE Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), along with the Italian actor Franco Nero dressed as silent film star Rudolph Valentino as “The Sheikh”; and the performance artist Nasim Aghdam, the “YouTube Shooter”. Each of these characters stand for a set of entangled, interrupted, failed or manipulated ideals and desires. Alongside these, a final group shows covers of Harper’s Bazaar magazines superimposed with images of actual bazaars.

Exhibited with these Embroideries are works of a type Ahrarnia has never shown before, yet which have been in development for the past six years. Working with a brother and sister team of commercial painters in Hamdan, Western Iran, Ahrarnia uses Soviet social realist and 19th century European style paintings as the basis of his compositions. Adding objects acquired from the bazaar directly to the surfaces of the artworks, Ahrarnia’s compositions are a direct challenge to the hierarchy of painting vs. found objects. His sourcing of these objects and inspiration comes from the antique shops he trawls, the bazaars of Iran and the many car-boot sales that he used to attend in Yorkshire, almost religiously every Sunday morning regardless of the weather.

Ahrarnia is aware of the implications of appropriation and its conceptual potentialities: through the creation of reproductions a new set of qualities emerges. The applied brush strokes and the painterly marks achieved are always different from the originals, sometimes slightly more crude or coarse, or more rigid and self-conscious. Ahrarnia’s interest in these qualities, the notion of cultural mimicry which never feels “authentic”, which runs deep in many aspects of our cross-cultural multiple realities, and our state of selecting and editing images, and to some degree reinforce our status, interests and ambitions. Through the additive process of embroidering, creating a texture otherwise lacking from flat digital images, and by fixing objects to paintings made by commercial painters, and thereby questioning notions of originality, Ahrarnia makes these images his own.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

In my work, I have tried to explore the relationship between language and identity, in a cultural, historical and contemporary context. As a Pakistani citizen, having to experience the decline of our national language in almost every sphere of life, has led me to revisit the relationship of this language with my own identity. The fractures that result within one’s own being, after one feel that he is slowly being dispossessed of a language, fragments the relationship that one has with one’s own self. This fragmentation, confusion and disorder that seem inescapable and overpowering are what have informed my work.
This led me towards another aspect of language; its paradoxical nature as both the conveyer as well as the limiter of meaning. I see language as essential to communication but also feel that there is so much that it seems to leave behind in its construction; the mass of abstract emotions, feelings and sensations that inform identity and communication seem to be lost in the structure and system of language. The range and limitation of language, experienced by me on an everyday basis, is also one of the concerns that I try to engage with.

Carving out words and recomposing them is also a cathartic act, in which I try to break language down into its most basic constituents and attempt a reconstruction of language and identity, trying to arrive at something more than just itself. The rediscovery of language by freeing it from the page where it is composed in a particular fashion and then recomposing it, changing its meaning, its character as language, is an act of plasticising language to see what it has the potential to lead to.

– Ghulam Mohammad

Courtesy of 1×1 Gallery

LONDON ART FAIR ANNOUNCES LONDON ART FAIR: EDIT PRESENTING LEADING MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY GALLERIES IN A REFINED PROGRAMME OF DIGITAL INITIATIVES.

Whilst we are unable to present London Art Fair in its usual physical format at the Business Design Centre, Islington, we remain focused on delivering a safe and compelling alternative for us to bring our Fair community together.

Returning for its 33rd edition 20 – 31 January 2021 (VIP Preview 18 – 19 January), London Art Fair: Edit will present over 50 leading modern and contemporary galleries in an alternative digital format.
Providing an unmissable opening to the art calendar, London Art Fair: Edit invites collectors and enthusiasts to discover works by renowned artists from the 20th century to today.

The digital Fair will host online Viewing Rooms allowing visitors to discover, browse and enquire upon selected works from the galleries, featuring audio and written commentaries narrated by the galleries themselves; allowing for a more personal interaction and viewing experience.
An inspiring programme of Talks and interactive Workshops will include panel discussions and conversations with artists, curators and leading experts, providing further insight to the work on show and taking an in-depth look at emerging trends and art world topics.
New additions to 2021 include LAF Selects with invited experts, collectors and prominent friends of the Fair presenting their own personal highlights from the Viewing Rooms.

Alongside the galleries curated Viewing Room presentations and continuing the Fair’s role in nurturing collecting at all levels, LAF Editions provides our audience with a unique opportunity to purchase limited edition prints exclusively through London Art Fair website.

2021 EXHIBITORS
Over 50 galleries from around the world are participating in London Art Fair: Edit. With regular London Art Fair exhibitors Advanced Graphics London, Jealous (London), Jill George Gallery (London), Rabley Gallery (Wiltshire), Beaux Art London, Oxford Ceramics (Oxford) and England & Co.; alongside first-time exhibitors EVE LEIBE GALLERY (London), Bavan Gallery (Iran) and African Arty (Morocco).

London Art Fair’s specialism in Modern British art continues to be strongly represented and received through the participation of some of the UK’s leading galleries in the field including Osborne Samuel (London), The Nine British Art (London), Browse & Darby (London), Castlegate House Gallery (Cumbria), Crane Kalman Gallery (London) and Jenna Burlingham (Hampshire).

Also making a welcome to return to the Fair, Richard Green (London) presents No Man is an Island, a selection themed on British artists’ response to the twentieth century: currents of European Modernism entwined with British Romanticism and a strong association with Nature. Highlights include John Piper’s pulsating Abstract Forms on white ground, 1935, informed by his experience of the art of Picasso and Braque and William Scott’s Poem for a jug, no.19, 1980, muses on the purity and timeless beauty of everyday objects.

Contemporary galleries include; CHARLIE SMITH LONDON with Project Papyrophilia, Purdy Hicks (London) presenting new photographic work by Céline Bodin, Sandra Kantanen and Susan Derges, new works by two British painters Gill Button and William Brickel and sought-after works by artist Sikelela Owen. African Arty will be presenting a focus selection of contemporary African art artists including; Cedrick Sungo, Franck Kemkeng Noah, Dagmar van Weeghel and Cinthia Sifa Mulanga.
Platform: Folk Art

Launched in 2019, the Fair’s curated section, Platform focuses on a single distinct theme, with galleries presenting well-known, overlooked and emerging artists that align to the focus. For 2021, the theme is Folk Art and at a time when the world is ever changing, curator Candida Stevens, looks at our cultural heritage, our communities and our identity, and how artists working in the Folk tradition have chosen to pass on this knowledge and inspiration.

Platform galleries at LAF EDIT are Candida Stevens Gallery, Cavaliero Finn, Ed Cross Fine Art, Gibbons & Nicholas, Jaggedart, MADEINBRITALY, Outside In, Robert Young Antiques, Ruup & Form, Ting – Ying and Vessel Gallery.

As London Art Fair: Edit’s Marketplace Partner, Artsy will provide a unique opportunity for exhibiting galleries to promote their virtual booths to Artsy’s global audience. Collectors can experience London Art Fair on Artsy to discover artists, save favourite works, view works on their home walls through Artsy’s AR mobile tool and directly purchase work from galleries.

Dissolving the boundary between technology and sculpture, Mathias Hornung showcases his first solo exhibition at Anna Laudel Istanbul. Hornung draws a bow from the woodcut into the digital world and situates his images thematically and structurally in the confusing present. By doing that he questions the multi-layered and at the same time incalculable dimensions of dealing with information in an irritating way.

Hornung, symbolises different ages, each re-enlightens itself, expands into new possibilities, commonalities, and points of view with wood, paper, and technological devices used in his artworks. In a world of ever more perfect technical images and the medial flood of images, he links their codes with the old process of high pressure with his direct manual access to sensual immediacy, to corporeality and haptics.

Artworks based on rectangular grids printed either on paper or three-dimensionally on the wood are sensual and at the same time conceptual images that play with the space and interspace between media and materials. In his woodblock prints, Mathias Hornung presents the past, present, and future’s oscillating relationship. Topography, as well as time and space, play an important role in his works, but the ultimate idea behind his works is the break from the perfect, even and regular web of life.

“Echos” can be seen at Anna Laudel Istanbul until 28 February 2021.

Courtesy of Anna Laudel

The C.A.M. Gallery starts the year 2021 with an exhibition entitled “Yelıng” by Mahmut Celayir. For this exhibition, the artist was inspired by a healing plant called Yelıng growing on high mountains and acknowledged as the forerunner of spring.

“As a nature explorer with new perceptions and experiences, soil and plant formations remain the main resource of my work. Intimately witnessing the earth leads us to reconsider our roots and the source of life. The world’s organic, rich, charming, and instructive motions constitute a supply that I cannot remain indifferent to as an artist.

In my recent work, I have concentrated on a plant called Yelıng in Zazaki*. Growing aloft, this plant appears as the signal of the springtime to come, when the snow starts to melt. With its high nutritious value, the Yelıng replaces the winter provisions which run out at the beginning of spring; women harvest Yelıng singing folksongs. This ritual has a special place in my childhood memories. Afterward, during the summer days, the sunlight changes the plant in different and flowing ways. This dynamic and spontaneous vivacity offers an abstract abundance of textures and forms relevant to the language of painting.

Inspired by local material sprouted on summits and keeping our lives company, I wanted to reach out a genesis of universe cosmic and organic, with a close perspective. Hereby what is determinant is, nature’s, consequently life’s laminated dynamism which gives us hope with its renewing and healing qualities. Life goes on…

* The language that is spoken by the Zaza people of eastern Anatolia.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is pleased to announce Hoda Tawakol’s exhibition Corps (in)visibles / (In)visible Bodies in the French Institute’s ‘LES VITRINES’ street-front art space in Berlin. This exhibition is curated by Liberty Adrien.

Snaking across 25 meters, a dark mural dotted with the unblinking divine eyes of Horus sets the tone of this wry intervention where critique rubs shoulders with the uncanny.
A languishing, bulbous textile sculpture conjures a gnarled odalisque. Elsewhere, mammary-like appendages sag atop a multifarious bouquet of wadded tendrils.

A dark, jungle-like tapestry conflates nature with the body, and a trio of boisterous yet troubling falcon hoods crown the glassed-in show, which echoes her exhibition Between Bodies, shown at the Dubai gallery from 21 November 2020 to 25 February 2021.
In both interventions, Tawakol deepens her ongoing interrogation into politically charged questions surrounding the manipulation of women’s bodies and feminist agency.

Corps (in)visibles / (In)visible Bodies, part of the wider INDEX series of exhibitions in the German capital, has been selected by Frieze as among the top seven European shows currently on view.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

François Morellet (1926 – 2016), a prolific self-taught painter, sculptor, and installation artist, developed a radical approach to geometric abstraction during a career spanning more than six decades. The artist’s inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, ‘François Morellet. In-Coherent,’ will offer a glimpse of Morellet’s prolific and multi-faceted oeuvre from 1953 – 2013, including some rarely seen key abstract geometric paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, a major wall installation from 1977, space installations and several neon works, a medium pioneered and continuously readdressed by the artist throughout his life. The exhibition makes plain Morellet’s lasting influence in art through his distinctive talent for bringing Dada- infused irreverence, irony, and joyful lightness to his aspiration of dismantling traditional hierarchies and embracing elements of randomness and chance within the framework of pre-established systems.

Organised with Olivier Renaud-Clément, ‘François Morellet. In-Coherent’ underscores the full breadth of the artist’s artistic explorations through a large array of mediums. The exhibition begins with works from the 1950s, a period during which Morellet turned from figurative and representational work to abstraction following an influential trip to Brazil in 1950. Inspired by his first encounters there with Concrete art and the work of Max Bill, he began creating works that followed simple systems and rules and eliminated as many arbitrary decisions as possible. On personal detachment, Morellet has said, ‘All my work is about doing as little as possible and making the fewest possible arbitrary decisions.’ His ‘Trames’ (Grids) paintings feature, for example, superimposed grids of perpendicular lines or networks of dashes rotated at various angles, as in ‘36 trames de tirets pivotées au centre’ (36 Grids of Dashes Rotated at the Centre) (1960). In works such as ‘Carrés et triangles rouges et bleus’ (Red and Blue Squares and Triangles) (1953) and ‘Carré inscrit dans un carré’ (Square Inscribed in a Square) (1954), Morellet exploits the possibilities of simple geometry by creating a system of circumscribed squares which in turn form isosceles square triangles. These early works also expose Morellet’s intent to use descriptive titles containing the information necessary for the viewer to understand the rule behind the creation of the work.

Morellet eventually went beyond the confines of the picture plane and in the 1970s became interested in what he called ‘the outside of painting,’ focusing on three-dimensionality and introducing steel, iron, wire, mesh, and later wood into his work. Three space installations in the exhibition, each composed of a metal angle iron and two white canvases, exploit the simple rule of finding ways to connect two surfaces that are not situated in the same plane by the sole straight line shared by these surfaces. By exploring the possibilities of three- dimensionality, Morellet succeeds in creating a new train of thought: rather than drawing focus into the interior of the picture plane, he broadens his scope to include the spaces around, beneath, and above the painting.

In the 1980s Morellet explored relief paintings containing irregularly shaped elements, often natural material culled from outside. Morellet found it ‘wonderful that nature has finally started to imitate painting.’ In works such as ‘Géométree n° 69’ (1984), he incorporates chance and humor to the most cogent effect. The title ‘Géométree’ is a portmanteau combining two words that describe his work’s ingredients – geometry and a tree branch. Here, an arched tree branch that juts from the canvas dictates the shape and the curve of an intersecting line drawn in pencil, creating two larger intersecting circles that continue beyond the plane of the canvas. In a series of diptychs entitled ‘Entre deux mers’ (Between two seas) (2012 – 2013), the sea level, suggested by brushed stainless steel plates placed on the canvases, forms a visual line uniting the two paintings that make up each diptych, and, beyond that, the series as a whole: ‘I’ve enjoyed juxtaposing two of these ‘Entre deux mers.’ I’ve been dreaming of showing several variations of ‘Entre deux mers’ in a single room from the beginning – a room that wouldn’t be too big and, of course, with all the seas at the same level. That way, the viewer would really be out at sea.’ Viewers could also see a reference to the name of a white wine from the Bordeaux region traditionally paired with oysters. The tilted canvases could then humorously evoke the queasiness caused by excessive wine consumption.

Also on view at Hauser & Wirth are wall drawings, conceived according to a technique that the artist explored as early as 1968, and reconfigured for this exhibition following a previously determined system. In ‘4 trames 30° 60° 120° 150° partant des 4 angles du mur’ (4 Grids 30° 60° 120° 150° starting from the 4 angles of the wall) and ‘4 trames 30°, 60°, 120°, 150° partant d’un angle du mur’ (4 Grids 30°, 60°, 120°, 150° starting from 1 corner of the wall) (1977 / 2021), the artist left the most concise instructions to create a network of lines traced with black adhesive tape on a blank white wall. These ephemeral works showcase Morellet’s engagement with systems based on simple rules as a proliferation factor and with the notion of ‘all over’, allowing him once again to go beyond the arbitrary limits of the canvas.

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Lévy Gorvy is pleased to present Horizons, an exhibition curated by Etel Adnan in collaboration with Victoire de Pourtalès. This presentation centers on a new poetic and nostalgic text by Adnan, based on her experience of moving between her native Lebanon, California, and France. Adnan considers the importance of those shifts, the physical and aesthetic displacements of her personal horizon, and the questions raised by such mutations. The show brings together artists whose work resonates with her own: Simone Fattal, Nancy Haynes, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Paulo Monteiro, Eugénie Paultre, Ugo Rondinone, Christine Safa, and Ettore Spalletti.

Understood in its primary sense, as a visible phenomenon, the horizon (from the Greek horos, “I trace a line”) designates a line that appears in the eye of the observer when they project their gaze over a limitless expanse. This horizon line, an element that is by nature intangible and abstract, the virtual meeting point of sky and sea, marks both the frontier of the finite and the infinite. It is a mirage and support of perspective. It sustains productive paradoxes that make it possible to interrogate the dynamic of perception and knowledge. The exhibition brings together artists driven by the same poetic instinct as Adnan, for whom the horizon also constitutes a starting point from which plural narratives unfold. The result is a great spectrum of aesthetic, poetic, and philosophical variations conducive to speculation and meditation.

Among the artists in the show, Simone Fattal has led a parallel life to Adnan, leaving Lebanon to live in France and the United States. In her delicate ceramic sculptures she fashions a suspended horizon—between reality and myth, abstraction and figuration— whose equilibrium is sought in the communication of an immutable light. It is also from the light that Adnan draws the essence of her work as a poet and painter. The result is an incandescent palette and a sensuous materiality in which the heritage of Nicolas de Staël and Joan Mitchell can be perceived, in particular the flamboyant and febrile light that they instilled into their paintings. In her text, Adnan lingers on the blaze of the Beirut sky at nightfall—and these sparks recur in the portraits by Franco- Lebanese artist Christine Safa whose ochre blues are drawn from the Mediterranean Sea and the walls of the Lebanese capital.

As for Eugénie Paultre, Nancy Haynes, and Paulo Monteiro, they turn to the shadows that can be found within the horizon’s fault lines. Whereas Paultre contains a somber glow in her minute paintings, Haynes invokes homages to writer and poets in canvases where light is compressed behind veiling shades of gray. Ugo Rondinone’s works elegantly complete this landscape in which balance is drawn from an alterity of lines and colours. These images of displaced horizons invoke numerous art historical figures, such as Agnes Martin and Anna-Eva Bergman, who explored the spiritual and aesthetic richness contained with the horizon line.

Through the constellation of works and artists assembled here, Adnan dwells on and questions the horizon, making us aware of a profoundly personal vision. She reminds us that the urban environment shows us a finite world in which perception is constantly thwarted, and that we must get down to reappropriating the fields of possibility that lie within the expanses of the horizon.

Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy.

Sabrina Amrani is pleased to present FloodZone, Anastasia Samoylova‘s first exhibition in Spain. The title of the show is borrowed from her eponymous project started in 2016, a photographic series in which the artist seeks to respond to the environmental changes on coastal cities of South Florida.

The project is built upon a set of interrelated paradoxes: the seductive and destructive dissonance between the official iconography of the region, comprised by tourist and real estate advertising, and the stark daily realities of climate change; the ways of landscape and the sense of place are at once natural and constructed; and the way photography both records and crafts perception.

Although the project was prompted by the effects of a major hurricane, FloodZone avoids the over-familiar media imagery of ruin and disaster. Instead, there are photographs of the saturated topography, portraits of locals, and close-up observations of architecture, abundant flora and fauna. Samoylova’s images provide a broad yet acute perspective on what it feels like to live in at-risk areas while economic forces instill a sense of denial and disavowal. Her subject is the precarious psychological state experienced by those living in a paradise sinking towards catastrophe.

By playing self-consciously with the familiar motifs and palette of the region, her photographs work as complex allegories. They pick out scenes, situations and details that compress multiple meanings and implications, bringing to the surface the many ways in which the fate and self-understanding of South Florida is bound up with its self-image. Photography is key in the making and remaking of collective memories and imagined geographies. FloodZone is a contemplation of this, at a moment of significant transition.

Floodzone has been featured in key publications as The New Yorker, Artforum and El País. The project is completed with a book, that was published by Steidl in 2019.

Courtesy of Sabrina Amrani

Pi Artworks Istanbul is presenting Iz Oztat’s second solo exhibition Watercolour on Paper. Oztat’s previous solo exhibition at the gallery titled Suspended, which received critical acclaim internationally, took place in 2019, during the 16th Istanbul Biennial.

The exhibition brings together a selection from the watercolour series In the Rivers North of the Future (2014-2017), Pleasure/Sizzle (2018-2019) and April Diary (2020), along with the video titled Recounting Nightmares to Running Water (2015), which is based on a series of watercolours. Since 2014, Oztat’s watercolour works accompany the artist’s research processes like a diary; bearing abstract traces of their transient making, as well as the contexts with which they are associated.

Although her work is dependent on the context within which it is produced, Oztat regularly revisits certain subjects: convergence of water and freedom, return of the suppressed past in the present and potentials of fiction in constructing historical narratives and ideological implications of display.

Iz Oztat started working with watercolours during her research on the struggles against the construction of run-of-the-river hydroelectric power plants to let the rivers flow free. The watercolour series In the Rivers North of the Future was made during her articulation of the desire for rivers and expression to flow freely, in relation to the political and economic conditions that prevent such flows. During this process, Oztat worked with a colour palette of blue, red and black, which she associated with the subject matter at hand. Oztat’s video Recounting Nightmares to Running Water was also produced in this period, departing from the Anatolian folk belief that nightmares flow away as they are described to running water. The watercolours flowing horizontally in the video are accompanied by a narrative that begins with a shamanic ritual initiated by reciting the names of rivers and moves through various states of consciousness in an attempt to resist drought.

Pleasure/Sizzle watercolour series was made during the research process of Oztat’s solo exhibition Suspended at Pi Artworks Istanbul in 2019, bearing traces of mourning, pain and pleasure. The sculptures in the exhibition, which appealed to the skin, were also utilised by the artist to caress, cut, scratch and fray the surface of the paper in the making of her watercolours.

Oztat’s April Diary series, made during the quarantine experienced on a global scale in 2020, accompanied her research relating the current circumstances to crystallisation. This process culminated in the video Confused Examination Under Given Circumstances (2020), where some of the watercolours from the series appear.

Watercolour on Paper brings together watercolours from distinct periods of for the first time and reveals a different dimension of Iz Oztat’s practice. Some of the watercolours previously appeared in various exhibitions and contexts: A selection from the series In the Rivers North of the Future was exhibited at the 14th Istanbul Biennial Salt Water: A Theory on Thought Forms in 2015. The video Recounting Nightmares to Running Water, produced as part of the exhibition organised by The Moving Museum in Istanbul in 2015, was shown in the lecture-performance, at the end of which the watercolours of nightmares were gifted to the audience, and was screened at the symposium titled Testimony as Environment: Violence, Aesthetics, Agency organised at the London School of Economics in 2019. The book titled Haz/Cızz [Pleasure/Sizzle], published by Yapi Kredi Publications in 2020, features the correspondence between curator Bige Orer and Iz Oztat, along with their conversation following the exhibition Suspended, and includes a selection of watercolours shown in the Watercolour on Paper exhibition. The video Confused Examination Under Given Circumstances is on view as part of the group exhibition titled Crystal Clear at Pera Museum in Istanbul until the 7th of March, 2021. In the exhibition catalogue, Bruno Latour’s text titled What Protective Measures Can You Think of So We Don’t Go Back to the Pre-crisis Production Model? is accompanied by a selection of watercolours from Oztat’s April Diary.

Courtesy of Pi Artworks.

Tabari Artspace is pleased to announce the dual exhibition of Haifa-based, Palestinian hyperrealists Samah Shihadi and Michael Halak at our Dubai gallery.

Terra Un(firma) was originally intended to be the solo exhibition of Samah Shihadi, scheduled to take place at Cromwell Place in London, October 2020. As with many events and expectations over the previous year we were forced to adapt as London moved into lockdown. As such the exhibition has evolved in unexpected ways, first with a digital showcase and now with a physical exhibition in Dubai which now encompasses a body of work by fellow Haifa-based hyperrealist, Michael Halak.

Samah Shihadi
The body of work produced by Shihadi for Terra Un(firma) is divided into two segments, The Living and The Land, which take the artist’s personal narratives and feminist outlook as a starting point from which to explore issues faced by women, across cultures, in the contemporary moment.

Michael Halak
While Shihadi’s art is often rooted in the past or observe the present through the lens of fantastical-realism Halak’s photo-real paintings are fixed firmly upon the current moment. Halak’s art follows western traditions of realist, illusory painting, but diverges in content which conflates local and global realities. This combination opens up the opportunity for multiple readings of his work and urges the viewer to consider more closely the contents with which they are presented.

Courtesy of Tabari Artspace

Intersect Art and Design presents Intersect 21, a virtual exhibition featuring art, design, and photography from 21 galleries in southern California, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Intersect 21 will be live at Intersect2021.com from February 16 through 22, 2021 and on Artsy from February 16 through March 15, 2021. There will be an opening event online at Intersect2021.com on February 16 at 12pm Eastern, preceded by an invitation-only VIP preview from 12am to 12pm Eastern.

Intersect 21 presents a focused, curated platform for cultural exchange. Galleries included will explore the notion of art and place, the creation of art in these specificregions, and the impact it has on their culture and society.

Exhibitors include the following 21 galleries from 10 countries:

Southern California:
Peter Blake Gallery (Laguna Beach, CA, USA)
Edward Cella Art + Architecture (Los Angeles, CA, USA)
HOHMANN (Palm Desert, CA, USA)
Imago Galleries (Palm Desert, CA, USA)
Melissa Morgan Fine Art (Palm Desert, CA, USA)
Timothy Yarger Fine Art (Los Angeles, CA, USA)

Middle East:
Artzotic (Amman, JORDAN)
Athr Gallery (Jeddah, SAUDI ARABIA)
Saleh Barakat Gallery (Beirut, LEBANON)
The Gallery of Everything (virtual pop-up)
Leila Heller Gallery (Dubai, UAE)
Khak Gallery (Tehran, IRAN)
Galerie Tanit (Beirut, LEBANON)
Zawyeh Gallery (Dubai, UAE and Ramallah, PALESTINE)

North Africa:
Al-Tiba9 (Algiers, ALGERIA)
Art D’Égypte (Cairo, EGYPT)
DIWANIYA ART GALLERY (Cheraga, Algiers, ALGERIA)
Le LAB (Giza, EGYPT)
Galerie SINIYA28 (Marrakech, MOROCCO)
Galerie TINDOUF (Marrakech, MOROCCO)
TINTERA (Cairo, EGYPT)

Intersect Art and Design’s CEO Tim von Gal explains, “Building on the success of our Intersect Aspen and Intersect Chicago online viewing rooms in 2020—each of which included over 100 international exhibitors—we are using this focused platform to highlight some of the fascinating cross-cultural connections that we’re able to foster with the Intersect Fairs, and putting that focus on 21 galleries. We’re excited to present this focused look at art and design from southern California, the Middle East, and North Africa.”

Becca Hoffman, Managing Director of Intersect Art and Design says, “Intersect 21 is a boutique curated platform meant as a forum for cultural exchange in contemporary art, design, and photography. Bringing the world closer together during a time when we are apart, it aims to break down boundaries and explore cultural similarities from three very dynamic and unique regions.”

Rebecca Anne Proctor, curatorial advisor for Intersect 21, adds, “Collaborating with Intersect 21 on the Middle Eastern and North African segment of the fair has been a great opportunity. I have lived in the UAE for over 12 years during which I’ve had the great privilege of traveling throughout the Middle East gaining knowledge about artists, galleries, and institutions. I am so pleased to take part in this groundbreaking online fair that is bringing galleries and their programs from the region together in dialogue with those in California. During this challenging time we need to foster intercultural dialogue more than ever. Intersect 21 is providing galleries and institutions in the Middle East an additional platform through which to showcase their work to the world.” Each gallery featured in

Intersect 21 will present 21 works by a range of international artists.
Highlights include:

Southern California:

Peter Blake Gallery will present work by installation artist, environmental artist, painter and sculptor Lita Albuquerque (b. 1946, Santa Monica, California), who was raised in Tunisia, North Africa and Paris, France.

Edward Cella Art + Architecture will present work by Kendell Carter (b. 1970, New Orleans) who creates site-specific installations that engage issues of race, gender, material culture, and shared history; sculptor and ceramic artist Brad Miller (b. 1950, New York) whose work is inspired in part by the cellular structures found in nature; and Amir Zaki (b. 1974, Beaumont, California) who creates photographs of California skateparks.

HOHMANN will present work by sculptors jd Hansen (b. 1979, USA), Claudia Meyer (b. 1961, Switzerland), and Julian Voss-Andreae (b. 1970, Germany), among others.

Imago Galleries will present work by Jeremy Kidd (b. 1962, England) who is known for his painting, sculpture, digital and installation art; and sculptor Randy Polumbo (b. 1984, Cleveland, Ohio) whose recent projects include glass “Blossom” works, and immersive environments from Bombay Beach CA, to MONA in Tasmania.

Melissa Morgan Gallery will present work by artists Anthony James (b. 1974, England), Andy Moses (b. 1962, Los Angeles), and Olivia Steele (b. 1985, Nashville), among others—all of whom are evolutionarily connected to the light and space movement.

Timothy Yarger Fine Art will present work by two light and space artists: Laddie John Dill (b. 1943, California) and Mads Christensen (b. 1971, Denmark).

Middle East:

Athr Gallery will present photographs by artist Ahmed Mater (b. 1979, Saudi Arabia) from his project Desert of Pharan: Unofficial Histories Behind the Mass Expansion of Mecca; and a new work by Sultan Bin Fahad (b. 1971, Saudi Arabia), titled Holy Economy, an intricately beaded tapestry that tackles issues of translation and exchange of cultures.

Leila Heller Gallery will present works by Reza Derakshani (b. 1952, Iran), Leila Pazooki (b. 1977, Iran), and Marwan Sahmarani (b. 1970, Beirut), among others.

Salah Barakat Gallery and Agial Art Gallery will present work by interdisciplinary artist Hiba Kalache (b. 1972, Beirut) whose work spans installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture.

Galerie Tanit will present work by Chafa Ghaddar (b. 1986, Lebanon), who shines a new light on the ancient mural-making technique of fresco and attempts to merge natural painting techniques in contemporary practices; Rania Matar (b. 1964, Lebanon), who explores issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood; and Kevourk Mourad (b. 1970, Syria), a performance artist specializing in spontaneous painting, sharing the stage with musicians; among other artists.

North Africa:

Le LAB will present work by designers Omar Chakil, George Mohasseb (b. 1973, Lebanon), and Richard Yasmine.

TINTERA will present work by emerging artist Sara Sallam (b. 1991, Egypt) and established artist Bernard Guillot (b. 1950, France), along with photographs by Paul Geday (b. 1956, Egypt), among others.

Programming

Intersect 21 programming will include video tours of artist studios, panel discussions, and other online events that highlight work and cultural connections between the three regions. Each day of the fair will have a specific theme: architecture, design, pattern, memory, environment, culture, and identity.

Visit the Fair on Artsy

Intersect 21 has partnered with Artsy, the global marketplace for discovering and collecting art. In addition to accessing the fair through Intersect2021.com, visitors may also visit the fair through Artsy. As Intersect 21’s Main Marketplace Partner, Artsy will provide a unique opportunity for exhibiting galleries to promote their virtual booths to Artsy’s global audience. Collectors can experience Intersect 21 on Artsy to discover artists, save favorite works, view works on their home walls through Artsy’s AR mobile tool and directly purchase work from galleries. Intersect 21 will be live on Artsy through March 15, 2021.

With the onset of the newest lockdown measures announced in Lebanon this January, Galerie Janine Rubeiz invited its artists to explore the theme of Space and Emotion Amidst Confinement, and to reflect on the notions of humanity and social responsibility during these challenging times.

Here are various interesting works that have stemmed from this experience, and the different ways that the gallery’s artists explored these concepts in the latest online exhibition, Space and Emotion Amidst Confinement.

You may request to purchase any of the artworks through the website and you may contact the gallery on [email protected] or +961 71359302 for any inquiries.

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz.

Dastan presents “Over There”, an exhibition of works by Taba & Shooki. The exhibition will open on February 19 and continue through March 12, 2021. This is the third exhibition of Taba & Shooki at Dastan, following “Tales of Interdisciplinia: The Curious Company of a Very Long Tail” (Dastan’s Basement, January 2019) and “Memebrain” (Electric Room, 19/50, December 2017).

“Memebrain”, their first collaborative project, was an interdisciplinary multimedia installation consisting of a recorded performance, animation, paintings and three-dimensional works. In “Memebrain”, the artists created a space within the exhibition space, a trend which would be continued and expanded upon in their next exhibition, “Tales of Interdisciplinia: The Curious Company of a Very Long Tail” in which a number of different territories were created to present a multi-dimensional narrative. The current project follows a similar approach, and recycles the same wall-like structures uses in the previous exhibitions, reusing and reshaping them to create territories within the exhibition space; an alternative world designed to take the viewer into a visual and narrative path.

The subject matter of this exhibition is the mountain and its depictions. Yet, here the mountain is a mere form and an excuse to project the artists’ personal experiences unto, so as to create a unique experience of it. Visiting the mountain, one encounters new experiences that are fundamentally different from life in the city.

Following their previous approach, over the recent year, the artists focused on the topic from several different points of study, including mythological, symbolism and semiotics, and moved on to design a multi-disciplinary and multi-media context comprising painting, three-dimensional work, interactive and kinetic pieces, video and animation. Such an approach, while evident in the general outlook of the show, remains discernible in each of the pieces, as each work features a unique intermixing of media.

The mountain experience is often perceived as a sublime, elevated and unreal experience. Nevertheless, in recent history, this experience has morphed into a type of entertainment, while the mountain has also become a place for extraction of materials, moving away from their archetypal concepts of a sacred place and a source of inspiration. In this exhibition, this metamorphosis has become a motivation for the territorialisation/de territorialisation of the gallery space, to present layers of their narrative.

A large painting symbolises the grand, wide, and panoramic view one feels while overlooking the territories below, and seeks to cover the viewer’s field of view when entering the show.

The parchment-paper walls, or “membranes” as the artists refer to them, recycled from the previous show, this time stand against a naturalistic depiction approach and are covered with artificial and vivid colours, since “as art seeks to depict nature more objectively loyal, it becomes more artificial”. The membranes have created a hallway, defining a part of the exhibition as a confined territory. Like the archetypal sacred or inspirational remote caves in history, this narrow path symbolises the journey inside a mountain and into the earth, or the inner world of the artists.

The interactive pieces in the exhibition, on the other hand, stand for the aforementioned recent change in our perception of the mountains: from being sacred to becoming objects of entertainment. Moreover, they symbolise the return journey from the mountain to the city, standing on the open plain and taking a few deep breaths farewell.

Taba Fajrak and Shokoofeh Khoramroodi (Taba & Shooki) are an artist duo based in Tehran, Iran. They began working together in 2016 after meeting during a collaborative urban art project at Niavaran Cultural Center. The duo’s collaborative effort started with an interest in the representations of the self in art, which is reflected in the omnipresent imagery of their own figures in their pieces. Implicit in their work is the idea that self-reflexivity and performativity of the artist’s life and artistic conventions tend to be original sources of creation. Trying to defy any neat categorisation in their work, they believe that everyday life is a potential subject matter for art. They have depicted and recorded themselves in their pictures and videos, narrating the stories and their experiences as they work together as a duo. Discerning between interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice, the duo’s project is to make use of different techniques and media to form an interconnected body of work which encompass a wide range from animation, video, live and recorded performances to paintings, illustrations and three-dimensional large-scale installations. Taba Fajrak (b. 1989, Tehran, Iran) is a performance artist, dancer, and researcher. She is a graduate of English Language and Literature from the University of Tehran. She continued her studies in nonsense literature and non-verbal performance, obtaining a master’s degree in English Literature from Shahid Beheshti University (Tehran). Her pieces have been featured in several exhibitions and public performances. Taba frequently works in collaboration with other artists from a range of different disciplines. Shokoofeh Khoramroodi (b. 1988, Hamedan, Iran) studied Painting at the Faculty of Arts & Architecture (Azad University, Tehran) and Yazd Faculty of Art & Architecture. Focusing mostly on drawing over her career, more recently she has experimented in animation and multidisciplinary work. Shokoufeh’s drawings, paintings and animation pieces have been featured in more than ten group exhibitions, as well as a number of collaborative projects.

The artists would like to thank Mehran Afshar, Ashkan Zahraei, Mohammad Hossein Gholamzadeh, Siavash Naghshbandi, Tala Azarakhsh, Zahra Rostamian, Tahoora Ayati, Mehdi Navid for their support, and the team at Dastan’s Basement including Sam Roknivand, Parmiss Afkham Ebrahimi, Melika Zandi, Alireza Kazemi, Iliyar Mehrabi and Roshan Takallomi for their help during the show’s setup.

Courtesy of Dastan Gallery.

Mashrabia Gallery is very glad to announce their 7th collaboration with the Spanish artist Xavier Puigmartí presenting his very last body of work under the name “The Garden”.

Almost realised in the past claustrophobic year, during the isolation in his home in the heart of El-Fayyum Oasis, the 36 pieces that form his exhibition drew inspiration from his continuous observation of the surrounding enchanted landscapes.

Moreover, the cultural reminiscences of his personal favorite masterpieces: the old Egyptian paintings and Juan Miro’s famous “La Masia” (The Farm), played a pivotal role in shaping his vision of the ideal garden. In both, he found an intense love of nature and care for details: a flower might be a star, an insect, a god, an ant that can be equal to a mountain.

Last but not least, Puigmartí has recently sojourned in Iran, discovering the Persian gardens where dreams and memories materialise.

Courtesy of Mashrabia Gallery

The Egypt International Art Fair will showcase approximately 20 galleries from around the Middle East and North Africa Cairo, Egypt.

As most nations across the globe continue to grapple with the coronavirus, particularly as many countries re-enter lockdown and faced renewed restrictions, the Egypt International Art Fair is going against the odds to stage its second edition at the Dusit Thani Lakeview Hotel in Cairo from 26 – 28 February. The fair, which staged its first edition in the same edition from 8-9 March, intends to transform Cairo into another arts hub in the Middle East, a place where modern and contemporary art galleries, curators, artists and art professionals from around the region and internationally can congregate to share their love and knowledge of art and culture.

The Egypt International Art Fair marks the first art fair curated and organised in Egypt with the aim to offer an international platform for art and culture in Cairo. The first edition featured works by more than 100 artists with a total participation of around 1,300 artworks by 18 participating galleries from Egypt and the MENA region.

The second highly anticipated edition of the fair takes place with great enthusiasm from Egypt’s growing art scene. This new fair will feature a robust program of events, talks and studio events. There will also be two distinct sections at the fair: a galleries zone and a specially curated section displaying established and prominent artists from Egypt and abroad, including Syrian artists based in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Vienna,Lebanon and France; artists from Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabi and the UAE. Within this curated section will also be specially dedicated pavilions from Jordan and Bahrain.

In this online exhibition Amba Sayal-Bennett presents a new series of works on paper. The machinic forms explore drawing as apparatus of production: its form-building capacity. Taking pleasure in the virtual, Sayal-Bennett investigates the emergence of form through the inherent incompleteness of drawing. As an opening up or sketching out, drawing is always directed towards the future. Available for interpretation and re-translation, the works connect to what they are not in order to maximise themselves. They are polyvocal, promiscuously evoking many references whilst resisting being fixed to one. The outlines are not preconceived by the artist but arise though her coupling with material devices: stencils, paper, pens. Like following a thread in the dark, Sayal-Bennett explores how drawing is a process of unveiling- not of what was there before, but that which emerges from the encounter.

Courtesy of Carbon 12

What is the impact of displacement, migration and exile on artists who have been forced to leave their homes, or who have chosen to make their lives in another country?

Journalist and editor Jo Glanville talks to Iranian artist Afsoon and Iraqi artist Mahmoud Obaidi – who both explore ideas of homeland and nostalgia in their work – and to Almir Koldzic, Director of Counterpoints Arts, an organisation that works with migrant and refugee artists.

‘I believe that all countries are homelands for their inhabitants, so why should they not be homelands for me?’, says Obaidi. For Afsoon, ‘Iran lives inside me. I create and re-create it through my work.’

The two artists will reflect on the importance of memory, geography and a sense of place in their practice, as their work is showcased in a major new British Museum exhibition, Reflections: contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa.

The talk will be introduced by exhibition curator Venetia Porter. It’s part of the public programme accompanying Reflections, supported by the Contemporary and Modern Middle Eastern Art (CaMMEA) acquisitions group.

To attend this online event

Book now to secure your place. We are hosting the event on Zoom – a free video conferencing system that requires users to register in advance. If you do not already use Zoom, you can sign up using this registration link.

If the event is fully booked, or you do not wish to use Zoom, you can also watch the event streamed live – as well as other events in the series – on the Museum’s live events YouTube channel.

The Middle East’s leading art fair, Art Dubai will stage its 14th edition in a purpose-built venue at the iconic Gate Building in Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), 29 March to 3 April 2021.

Art Dubai will operate at the highest COVID-19 safety protocols; alongside standard procedures, including regular testing of participants, the fair has introduced extra precautions to manage capacity and offer a safe and flexible environment for all. These include extending the opening hours, adding an extra fair day and the newly launched Art Dubai App will allow visitors to book dedicated time slots in advance to guarantee entry.

The new Art Dubai App will also allow visitors to stay up-to-date with the latest news and announcements, explore the exhibiting galleries and artworks, view the full programme of exhibitions and cultural events happenings in galleries and public spaces across the UAE. From family-focused activities to cutting-edge, dynamic programming, a diverse array of activations will take place during the week of Art Dubai.

Featuring 50 leading Contemporary and Modern galleries from 31 countries visitors to Art Dubai 2021 can discover a diverse selection of artworks, artists and practices, reflecting the multicultural identity of the city along with a curated sculpture park with large-scale installations, featuring works by eight artists including Emirati Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim and Hussain Sharif.

As part of this year’s curatorial projects, Art Dubai will also present a Film Programme comprised of various short films. Screening stations placed along DIFC’s Gate Avenue will feature single-channel films produced by 20+ regional and international artists, each thematically categorized to curate a specific experience for the viewer, including: Nature, Journeys, Dystopias, Conversations, Performances and Animations, among others.

Art Dubai 2021 Participating Galleries

+2, Tehran
Gallery 1957, Accra
Addis Fine Art, Addis Ababa/London
Aicon Art, New York
Akka Project, Venice/Dubai
Galería Albarrán Bourdais, Madrid
Gallery ArtBeat, Tbilisi
Athr Gallery, Jeddah
Ayyam Gallery, Dubai
Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut
Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi/London
Comptoir des Mines Galerie, Marrakech
GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Havana/Rome/São Paulo/Paris
Custot Gallery Dubai, Dubai
Dastan’s Basement, Tehran
ELMARSA GALLERY, Dubai/Tunis
Experimenter, Kolkata
Eye for Art, Houston
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai
Gazelli Art House, Baku/London
Hafez Gallery, Jeddah
Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai/New York
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery,London/Berlin
Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai
Mark Hachem, Beirut/Paris/New York
Gallery Misr, Cairo
Meem Gallery, Dubai
Mono Gallery, Riyadh
Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels
PERROTIN, Hong Kong/Seoul/Tokyo/Shanghai/Paris/New York
Giorgio Persano, Turin
Perve Galeria, Lisbon
RONCHINI, London
The Rooster Gallery, Vilnius
SANATORIUM, Istanbul
SARADIPOUR Art Gallery, Los Angeles
Galerie—Peter—Sillem, Frankfurt
Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg
Silverlens, Manila
Stems Gallery, Brussels
TAFETA, London/Lagos
TEMPLON, Paris/Brussels
The Third Line, Dubai
Tropical Futures Institute, Cebu City
Vermelho, São Paulo
Vin Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City
Yusto/Giner, Marbella
Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah/Dubai
Salwa Zeidan Gallery, Abu Dhabi
Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg