Agenda

“The drawings of Ania Soliman constitute a complex body of research into how the switch from theory to practice, from world-views to worlds, or from epistemology to ontology, unveils many dilemmas. […] Soliman’s work deals with much more than lines and forms and colors and compositions. There is a reason why much of her work takes a large scale: it needs a battleground on which to address belief – the way it shapes the self, how the self relates to the “I”, and the “I” to all the others”. Chus Martinez1

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to announce the first solo exhibition of Ania Soliman in the Middle East, opening in our Beirut space on Thursday August 25, 2022, from 6 to 9 PM.

Centering around the idea of the Terraform, or the artificial reproduction of earth ecologies, the painting and drawing exhibition delves into the realms of the multi-layered connections, intersections and mergers between nature, technology, and humans. Soliman is a conceptual artist whose research-based practice often results in monochromic large-scale works on paper. After a month spent in Beirut, she produced works on canvas for the first time, using spray-paint, artificial and natural plants as well as pieces from dismantled obsolete machinery to leave organic shapes, poetic arabesques, or rough spontaneous streaks of paint on the fabric. The seriality and scale of these canvases that carry in their making both mechanical planning as well as natural impulses, underline the feeling of urgency and anxiety in our relationship to nature, to the point of acquiring sculptural attributes and becoming curtain-like objects hung in an engulfing loose rectangle.

While the spray-painted canvases are produced through performative action-painting, with quick bold moves that fill the space, the works on paper in Phtalo green follow a methodical process foregrounded by the artist and that allows her to identify the background from the objects that she draws using pigments, wax, and encaustic. The annotation system, revolving around the figure-ground relationship, becomes in turn part of the work, and results in surfaces that completely ignore central perspective. The four-paneled work on paper Terraform depicts a rainforest and turns a computer screensaver into an immersive experience, prompting the viewer to look for the tree, the leaves or the tiger concealed by the landscape. This specific color is used in a whole series that refers to our visual technologies and their addictive circuits: the toxic green works stem from the encounter with a culture that humans can no longer control.

The bamboo plants in fluorescent yellow use that annotation system to mimic technical drawings designed by humans to mass-produce artificial bamboos in plastic or cloth. The artificial plants represent the kind of irrational and manic overproduction that threatens the earth, yet they also reflect our desire for nature even in its most alienated manifestations.

Interestingly, some of the works titles are created in collaboration with a random word generator algorithm, while for others, Soliman uses machine mistranslations from Arabic, such as Chemical Emotions (kahraba) , Resurrecting Light (kahraba), Shaking the Nerves of Animals (kahraba) etc…

Ania Soliman’s Beirut diary includes insomnia drawings, banknotes and exploding galaxies, and is presented with a group of barrels, recuperated in the gallery neighborhood of Karantina, and constituting a “diwan” made of seats from recycled former oil containers. Ultimately, the exhibition doesn’t tackle technologies as such, but rather investigates how we feel, talk, and think about them: the core conceptual element of each work culminates in an overwhelming burst of colors.

Ania Soliman is an Egyptian, Polish, and American artist who grew up in Baghdad, and currently lives in Paris. She makes large scale drawings based on digitized imagery and archival material, while also working with text, performance, video and installation.

Her research-based practice focuses on processes of translation between different cultures and their representations. She is especially interested in how this determines our relationships, both real and imaginary, between nature and technology.

Through processes of tracing, desaturating, smudging, coloring, and embellishing, she transforms source materials into layered drawings that often repeat a motif since they represent the action of conflicting ideas working themselves out. Her works function as icons for unconscious negotiations between our bodies and the culturally determined languages that occupy our minds.

Ania Soliman’s work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2020), the Drawing Center in New York (2020), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2018), the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2016), the Museum of Contemporary Art at Antwerp (2015), the Whitney Biennial (2010), the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), the Museum der Kulturen in Basel (2014), among other venues, and she has recently done lecture-performances at the Global Art Forum in Dubai and Singapore. She attended Harvard College and Columbia University before participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2010 she was awarded the Laurenz-Haus residency in Basel, Switzerland.

Courtesy of Sfeir Semler Gallery

Feature Caption: Ania Soliman, Terraform 1 (everyone-zoospore, recovery-whew), 2022, colored pencil, encaustic, acrylic ink on paper, 4 panels of 280 x 115 cm each.

Every story starts somewhere, as an idea in a protagonist’s mind, a narrative composed of a series of incidents, or a place like no other.

In this exhibition, artists take the role of the narrator, recalling both shared and personal experiences to communicate ideas fundamental to the modern world. These stories demonstrate how individual, social and cultural dialogues intersect, providing a framework for the exhibition, which explores three main themes: character, spaces and places, and the narratives that inspire creative concepts.

In preparing work for the show, each artist delved into a world of their own, deriving inspiration from a variety of sources, including memories, dreams, daily life encounters, folk tales, nature, cities and architecture. The selected works interact with each other through the exploration of material, form and colour. They are also connected by the artists’ collective experience of living in Qatar and being part of its unique community.
This exhibition features works by 36 artists, emerging and mid-career, who took part in the Artist in Residence programme at the Fire Station in the years 2015–2021. Each piece acts as a metaphor (majaz) for the artist’s journey and evolving artistic practice, capturing a moment or an idea that represents their experience in the past years.

With projects ranging from painting, drawing, prints, sculpture, new media and installations, Majaz: Contemporary Art Qatar shares a thorough exploration of the process of storytelling, both real and imaginary.

Elmarsa Gallery is very pleased to present a selection of unique works by Abderrazak Sahli (1941–2009), one of the most prominent Tunisian abstract painters of the 20th century. This exhibition offers to see his paintings on burlap that were executed in the nineties, and that remain little known to the public at large.

Abderrazak Sahli, who was educated in the Koranic school of Zeitouniyya, explored the “defiguration” and “sonorisation” of words and texts as early as 1965. From then onwards he has worked in media as varied as photography, poetry, prints, paintings, books, boxes, bamboo sticks, sculpture, installations. His early figurative paintings later led to more conceptual exhibitions in Paris; combining old photographs and texts in Latin scripts of sonor poetry; other times his works were presented as part of a performance, with paintings and sculptures. His paintings react to a variety of stimuli, mixing unconscious elements with what is conscious, vigorous, and spontaneous. By alternating between the “full” (coloured) and the “empty” (uncoloured), Sahli seems to have endowed his starry mutant creatures with a kind of cosmic energy. The very expressive strength of the lightness of the forms or the shapes and the expressive strength of the whole is well demonstrated in his installation work « Buissons Ferriques » presented by Elmarsa at Art Projects at the first edition of Art Dubai in 2007, which was made of 100 metal stakes topped with painted patterns, in steel sheet metal of 180 to 270 cm height each.

Samia Halaby, de-coding colors

Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut is proud to present the first solo exhibition of SAMIA HALABY in their Beirut space, opening on January 12, 2023 from 6 to 9 PM in the presence of the artist.
Samia Halaby is a Palestinian-American artist, activist, and scholar living and working in New York.

Halaby constantly foregrounded works and techniques, and, in retrospect, was at the avant-garde of artistic production throughout her career. In her work, she manages to capture her biographical and political history, while acutely grasping the very essence of abstract painting.

Farid Haddad, For the Age of Lebanon

Sfeir Semler Gallery is proud to present Farid Haddad: For the Age of Lebanon, the artist’s first solo show in Beirut in over forty years. The exhibition presents an overview of Haddad’s painting oeuvre and spans the last fifty years of his practice between Lebanon
and the United States. The exhibition features a unique series of works from the early 1970s, on view for the first time.

Farid Haddad is a Lebanese-American artist who came of age in the years preceding the Civil War in Lebanon, and during a pivotal moment in Lebanese and Arab Modernism. This exhibition represents Haddad’s work as a vital chapter in the story of abstraction and
minimalism in the region. For the Age of Lebanon spans the artist’s early works, 1971–1977, and his most recent works, 2017–2022.

Mashrabia gallery of contemporary art are thrilled to invite you to the seventh edition of “My Favourite Things 7”. From 15 January until 20 February, 2023.
This annual all-girls exhibition started in 2016 as a small group exhibition, showing the artworks of 3 chosen women artists; featured by Mashrabia as the revelation of the season. In due course, “My Favorite Things” became an inclusive annual exhibition promoting and supporting up and coming women artists in Egypt. Its main aim is to guarantee for women to have a permanent and safe space, for exposure and free expression, maintaining a high artistic quality based on originality and innovative thought. There is no restriction to themes, as we seek authentic artwork that is most true, essentially reflecting subjects of great importance to the artists. This year’s selection includes 20 female artists, most of them participating for the first time. Their contributions give us a refreshing idea about what is contemporary art now in Egypt.

 Daniel Canogar returns to the Middle East this January with his first solo exhibition in the region. Canogar’s “Dynamo”, the audiovisual project installed in the Spanish Pavilion, was a highlight of EXPO 2020 for many, and 2021 also saw the artist present “Bifurcation”, a building-sized laser projection at Noor Riyadh, Saudi’s annual light and art festival. Now, his new solo show “Loose Threads” will launch at Galloire in City Walk, Dubai on 23rd January until the 24th February 2023. The exhibition gathers artworks which reference fabric and textiles in order to explore the technological reality of today.

Abu Dhabi, UAE: As part of its rich 2022-2023 cultural season, Louvre Abu Dhabi
has announced its upcoming exhibition, Bollywood Superstars: A Short Story of Indian Cinema, opening from 24 January and running until 4 June 2023. Organised in partnership with Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and France Muséums, the exhibition will showcase the depth and richness of the Indian sub-continent’s art and civilisation through its long tradition of image making, and the diversity of the Indian filmmaking industry.
Through more than 80 artworks including photographs, textiles, graphic arts, costumes and over 30 film extracts, the exhibition explores the rich history of the Indian cinema from its beginnings in the late 19 th century up to the present. The artworks come from the collections of Louvre Abu Dhabi, Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Musée de l’armée, Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet, al-Sabah Collection, Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation and Priya Paul Collection.

Quoz Arts Fest, the region’s best-loved arts and culture festival, returns for its 10^th edition on Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 January 2023 across Alserkal and Al Quoz. The weekend will feature a diverse and dynamic programme of more than 200 activations, and bring together more than 50 creative concepts from across Al Quoz, to celebrate a decade of success, and feature live music, art, contemporary dance, performing arts, food trucks, public art installations, wellness, and more. Highlights of the bumper weekend include headliners Bu Kolthoum and Saint Levant, who will be performing in the UAE for the first time, along with Big Hass, a Dubai-based hip-hop DJ known for his electric sets, and Omar Musa, a Bornean-Australian rapper and poet who will be treating festival-goers to a powerful spoken word performance.

The 10th edition of the festival will take place under the thematic ‘Shift Away.’ Visitors will be invited to set aside their preconceptions upon entering the festival’s ‘portals’ and shift away to three fantastical worlds. In Shift to Nature, visitors will be challenged on their perception of scale and implored to surrender to the vastness of nature; in Shift to Cyborg, they can explore the dizzying dimensions of the digital universe; and in Shift to Childhood, visitors can unleash their inner child, play, and believe in magic again. Each world will be brought to life with various installations, immersive activities, and more.

MENART FAIR is the international modern and contemporary art fair, dedicated to artists from the Middle East & North Africa, selected by must-see galleries.

The artists featured in MENART FAIR come from the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey), the Gulf States (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Yemen) and North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt).

The third edition of MENART FAIR will happen in Brussels from 3 to 5th February 2023 (VIP opening on 2nd February 2023).

A selection of ART + DESIGN from international galleries will be brought together for four days at the Boghossian Foundation (Villa Empain), a key venue in Brussels’ artistic life.

This exceptional event transports the visitor on a journey to the heart of this luminous and bewitching Orient.
The fair, in its confidential and joyful format, encourages collectors and visitors to take the time to meet the galleries and to exchange.

After a successful stretch at Pi Artworks London in November 2022, Fabio Lattanzi Antinori’s solo show, Chased by Unicorns, will be shown at Pi Artworks Istanbul from February 4th. Accompanied by several new works and performances, Antinori’s show looks to value-systems in society, the tension between personal gain and corporate profits and the politics of surveillance.

Central to the show is a series of sculptural and printed works comparing Raymond Williams’ notion of key words, a tool to understand how ‘important social and historical processes occur within language’ with current digital marketing’s calculated use of keywords. Put simply, terms we look for online and which are secretively used to predict our behaviour and then influence it through advertising techniques.

In the second part of the show the artist reflects on the unsustainable nature of the current economic model and on the way happiness, coopted by advertising and brands, can be used to perpetuate a culture of consumption and production. Combining the results of a survey designed to understand the psychological consequences of life as a consumer, with a selection of self-help books, podcasts and transcripts from instructional videos, Antinori trains and later asks an AI model to reflect on the nature of happiness.

The Third Line is pleased to announce Gut Feelings: Part II, the fifth solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Hayv Kahraman. Occupying both gallery spaces, Kahraman presents a series of new paintings and drawings that continue her ongoing scientific research and exploration into the effects of trauma on the body, and the role of the gut in our healing process.

Kahraman’s practice is heavily guided by her refugee experience, where notions of gender and trauma are consistent themes throughout her work. Recently, the artist has directed her research towards neuroscience, human immunology and “neurosculpting” – the ability to restructure the neural pathways in our brain through the gut microbiome – and how they specifically relate to trauma, and our ultimate goal to heal and repair.

Galleria Continua is pleased to present a new solo show, “Prayer for the Living”, by Jamaican born American artist, Nari Ward. Ward will exhibit an installation and
a series of artworks that have a spiritual dimension capable of transforming the
visitor’s perspective.

The exhibition will take place for the first time in the gallery’s spaces inside Dubai’s
most iconic hotel, Burj Al Arab Jumeirah. Galleria Continua now celebrates more than a year at the prestigious hotel, product of a collaborative and successful partnership for which the gallery hosts a varied programme of exhibitions by international contemporary artists.

Frieze Viewing Room is a free digital platform, connecting global audiences with Frieze’s galleries and artists.

Opening to all from February 09–20, the Viewing Room offers fair visitors a selected preview of gallery presentations coming to Frieze Los Angeles 2023, as well as the chance for audiences around the world to experience and acquire the artwork on show.

In collaboration with Vortic, the platform uses cutting-edge technology to create 3D viewing experiences with immersive 3D rooms featuring galleries such as Canada, OCHI, Nicola Vassell Gallery, The Pit, Welancora Gallery, Johyun Gallery amongst many others.

Art Cairo Gallery 

Art Cairo revealed that it will be holding its fourth edition in February 2023. As the first comprehensive art fair in the country, the fourth edition will feature galleries from all over the region, displaying the works of numerous artists. Cairo’s Dusit Thani Hotel, the fair’s venue, is hosting an engagement program of talks, panel discussions, and site visits for historical cultural scenes in Cairo.

Hauser and Wirth is pleased to announce that George Condo will inaugurate the newly established West Hollywood gallery with his first exhibition in LA in nearly five years.

With the exhibition’s title ‘People Are Strange,’ taken from the hit 1967 song of the same name by legendary – and quintessentially Los Angeles – band The Doors, Condo’s latest canvases are filled with fragmented portraits and abstractions. In these large-scale works, the artist renders layered, vibrating planes, lines and geometries that suggest a world of oppositional forces and states, at once solemn and euphoric, connected and entropic, logical and ineffable, beautiful and ugly. In their ability to convey deep contradictions through Condo’s mastery of the medium of painting, the canvases on view painted in New York City over the past year and a half are a reconstructive body of work involving both harsh lines and melodic painterly passages – and which characterize the dividing forces of modern life everywhere.

Notations On Time At Ishara Art Foundation

Notations on Time is a group exhibition that explores the philosophical and political dimensions of time through the works of 20 contemporary artists from South Asia and its diaspora. Curated by Sandhini Poddar and Sabih Ahmed, the exhibition stages a dialogue between artistic generations to highlight entanglements between the past, present and future.

The exhibition exists as a veritable laboratory of time, exploring art in notational, experimental and fragmentary forms. Standing apart from Western notions of linearity, progress and capitalist domination, Notations on Time explores ontological systems that reveal how artists from this region and its diaspora think about aesthetics, existence, remembrance and futurity.

Fann À Porter gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening of Alternative, a solo exhibition by Houssam Ballan, opening on Wednesday, 22 February at 7 pm.

Houssam Ballan’s Alternative highlights a large body of work that he produced during a year of significant transition, at a time when he left his home in Damascus to resettle in Beirut. In Lebanon, Ballan experienced a distinct symptom of exile, the feelings of detachment and disorientation that colors displacement, as his life was essentially severed from his native Syria. In this new city, a place where waves of mass exodus and influxes of migration have alternated over the last fifty years, Ballan quickly identified the emotional burden that comes with this experience. While these recent artworks are not outwardly autobiographical, as the artist intentionally limits recognizable symbols that reflect aspects of his life, they are deeply in tune with the experiences of Beirut’s diverse communities.

The NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Art Gallery pleased to announce of its Spring 2023 exhibition, the only constant, which explores human-landscape relations as they manifest in contemporary art practice, globally.

In this exhibition, artists confront our contemporary landscape, with a focus on the moment where humans change landscape, and landscape changes humans, moving from images related to paradise, and progressing to ideas of development and technological aspiration.

The exhibition officially opens to the public on Wednesday, February 22, 2023
and will be running from Tuesday through Sunday, 12-8 pm.

The Academy Art Museum is pleased to announce its current exhibition, Fractured Modernities: Contemporary Art from Turkey. This exhibition includes works by Didem Erbas, Merve Unsal, Erdem Varol, and Zeynep Kayan.

This exhibition explores the present moment in Turkey’s cultural history through the work of artists Didem Erbas, Merve Unsal, Erdem Varol, and Zeynep Kayan. The unique crossroads between empire and republic, heritage and modernity, and containment and globalization have forged complex webs in the fabric of the Turkish society that are present in each artist’s work, as the nation grapples with its identity and the social and cultural forces that make it so pluralistic. A dominant thread that brings the artists’ work together is a connection to this multicultural past, its manifestations in the present, and a critique of Turkey’s simplistic reputation as a bridge between the East and the West.

The influence of persistent political and economic upheaval is present in the way each artist explores the relationship between the built and natural landscapes and the people who live in them. From Erdem Varol’s grainy, high-contrast photographs taken from anywhere between a plane in high altitude to under a parked car, to Didem Erbas’ rich, fluid oil paintings documenting the exploitation of the country’s natural resources, the works in the exhibition marry movement and color with the heaviness of the nation’s past, especially in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria.

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to announce hosting an exhibition by the renowned Iraqi artist Afifa Aleiby from 26 February until 8 May 2023. The exhibition titled “Timeless Echoes” will include some of her latest artworks echoing her own life and tackling multiple societal and humane subjects.

Aleiby’s style is poetic, and her paintings have a unique quality of beauty mixed with the
intensity of emotions. Her work is a reflection on women’s state in society even though she stresses that she does not intend it to convey “a feminist statement” although it “may at times be related to women’s issues”. She adds: “I use the female figure as a medium to help communicate this idea. Women as human figures have something special that you cannot find in men: the way they move and their beauty.”

Elmarsa Gallery is delighted to present A Perfect World, the first solo exhibition by leading Tunisian modernist Aly Ben Salem (1910-2001) at Elmarsa Gallery, Dubai, offering viewers a perspective on a pivotal moment in North African art history. Ben Salem represents the first generation of artists to emerge out of Tunisia as the struggle for independence from French rule comes to its successful conclusion. He was initially trained in the academic style of painting at local art schools during the colonial period before rejecting that formal training as part of a generational political shift to exploring more authentic representation of his native culture. Ben Salem then moves to Paris in his early career and encounters a wider range of eastern and western painting styles before developing his unique style. At first glance, Ben Salem figurative visual language, like most of his Tunisian contemporaries, presents a sharp contrast to his North African peers’ abstract style who contested the figurative and narrative vision but, upon closer scrutiny, they share an expression of a plural Maghrebi identity and something inherent to their history, memory, identity, cultural heritage, authenticity. Somehow, by incorporating the various influences he encountered in his academic training and travels abroad, Ben Salem arrives at a modern painterly practice that is universal yet recognizably North African and continues to be visible in later artists work from the late 20th century.

Meem Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by the acclaimed Iraqi artist Mahmoud Obaidi.

Speaking truth to power has never been something Mahmoud Obaidi has shied away from in hiswork. The artist was introduced to the notion of injustice from his adolescence, and has since spentmuch of his life processing the destruction of his homeland andthe isolation of exile. At the sametime, he has found commonality in the suffering of a myriad of communities around the world whohave also faced the brutal force of racism, occupation and inconceivable loss. In creating art whichconfronts these complexissues, Obaidi looks beyond simplistic politics and perceptions of identity,instead seeking to uncover and understand trauma from a historical, structural and geographical lens.As with much of Obaidi’s oeuvre, this latest body of work is made up of a multitude of layers whichlie behind the external, visible yet abstract structures, shapes and colour, revealing a visual inquirywhich goes far beyond the difficult topics which he seeks to tackle-namely colonisation andgenocide-and simultaneously forces him to look within and explore his own personal sense ofdisplacement

Charmaine Chanakira will launch “Who Else is Here?” as part of the Alserkal Lates and to kick off Art Dubai at Mestaria Gallery. As part of her international debut, the UK-raised self-taught Zimbabwean artist uses vibrant hues and textures in her work that are inspired by symbolism and simplicity. With a pop-art inspired style, Charmaine’s work fosters a thought-provoking conversation on the intricacies of the human mind and showcases art’s capacity to inspire and promote healing. 

Colours, drawings and doodles come alive in a stunning fusion of neo-expressionism and spirituality. Chanakira’s works on paper are a window into her moments of self-reflection, offering a glimpse into the artist’s deepest thoughts and feelings. Her artwork holds the ability to uncover hidden aspects of our being that remain imperceptible to our conscious mind. 

NOT ONLY DIGITAL featuring works by Annalù, Marco Lodola and Emre Namyeter is the
exhibition opening on March 7, 2023, at Oblong Contemporary Art Gallery in Dubai, Bluewaters Island, where it will remain open until April 30, 2023.

The exhibition, curated by Gallerist Paola Marucci, consists of tangible and non-tangible artworks: digital art and material art meet in one exhibition through the works of Annalù, Marco Lodola and Emre Namyeter. Oblong Gallery thus presents the two horizons of art collecting today, the more traditional one based on unique, visible, and materially existing artworks, and that of NFTs (Non – Fungible Tokens), works created on a digital medium.

MARFA’ is pleased to announce hosting an exhibition by Caline Aoun.

The exhibition explores how artificial mechanisms can change the way we engage with our physical surroundings, which are always evolving through invisible forces. By disrupting the gallery’s very own environment, the different works describe the changing moments from invisible forces to visible and tangible things, and reveal the ambiguity between natural and artificial conditions. Such a disruption is similar to “singularity” in Mathematics, a point at which a surface, a construct, a thing ceases to be “well-behaved” and becomes uncontrollable or chaotic. Keeping this mathematical construct in mind, Caline Aoun’s works explore time and space’s intangible and ever-changing realms, and describe ephemeral points in time at which things become irreversible.

Saleh Barakat is pleased to announce hosting the exhibition “Rej3a Ya Mama” by Katya Traboulsi.

Traboulsi resuscitates the contradictions, complexities, and beauty of the ornament along with the graphic and typographic work adorning the backs and fronts of Lebanese trucks circulating across multiple geographies within and around Lebanon. Sharp, saturated colors gild phrases and symbols, reifying the image of their author. Inspired by the geographical differences between the Lebanese trucks and their aesthetics, Traboulsi’s iron works are an homage to Tripoli, revealing and transmitting images of her own informed by the cultural practices of the North. Abstracted floral gilds and birds inspired by cultural images coalesce with Khatt (calligraphy) proclaiming the advance of the heavens, thwarting the other’s envious gaze and ill will, calling for the mother or the nation.

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to announce the first of a series of Open Studio events: an open studio by artist Ala Albaba in the Al–Amari refugee camp in Ramallah, Palestine. We are inviting the public to visit Albaba’s studio, where they will get an opportunity to inspect Albaba’s artworks closely and engage in face–to–face discussions with the artist whose artworks topics deal mainly with the theme of refugee camps as structures and Palestinian refugees’ aspirations. The event aims to create a space that encourages interaction between residents of the camp, and the broader Palestinian public with Albaba‘s artworks, with the opportunity of viewing the works that are in progress. Albaba started working in his studio in the camp in 2010 , and the space soon became the incubator of his artistic career.

Zawyeh Gallery pleased to introduce an online virtual exhibition of selected works by the renowned Palestinian artist Nabil Anani.

Anani presents the Palestinian landscape without disruptions, a perfectly manicured, well-tended landscape. He paints the picturesque hills of Palestine without the ever-increasing Israeli settlements, by-pass roads, roadblocks, walls, and watch towers normally visible on every corner. He creates the Palestine of his dreams, inspired by his memories as a child growing up on the hills of Halhoul, a town near Hebron.

Olive groves, cypress trees, and wheat fields dot the hills and horizon as if they become part of an embroidered dress. The canvases are divided with horizontal lines and spaces inspired by the ancient terraces separating the fields, conveying a panoramic perspective and a rural ambiance. The trees carry different characters in each work as if they are putting on different costumes for each show.

Anani has addressed the Palestinian landscape and rural life throughout his artistic journey, and his fascination with them inspired his artworks.

The Third Line is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Spanish-Moroccan artist Anuar Khalifi. The exhibition, titled Mirror Ball, will debut a unique sculpture together with a series of richly detailed and vibrant paintings that continue the artist’s ongoing exploration in to the complexities of personal identity and the experience of living between two worlds, both seen and unseen.

Mirror Ballrefers to the only piece in the exhibition that is not a painting, but a sculpture. This title is symbolictotheentire exhibition, which is a journey to self-discovery.Commanding attention in the centre of the gallery,this reflecting sculpture–D1EB4UD1E(2023)–iswhere all the characters in the paintings are intertwined.Anchoringthem together,D1EB4UD1E(2023)represents their heart,theirorigin, andtheirultimatedestination

The work of Hanibal Srouji presented in this exhibition dates back to a crucial period in the history of his country, Lebanon. It was conceived within the quietness and the vacuum that the “end of the civil war” had created. The works reflect a particular temporal state; within which time is contained and prolonged. They assemble different visions of space, memories, and temporal states of mind.

Srouji proposes mixed references between visions of inside and outside. The paintings are knitted with memories of past harmonized spaces and through extended temporalities. The work explores, in abstract form, the effects of uncertain times. Each artwork is conceived within different color dominances, examining intimacy, traces left by conflict, and colored hopeful fields and surfaces.

Here, the painting is born within thrusts of formal visual decisions and painterly actions standing at the edge of despair, while color gives a hopeful outlook towards what is yet to come. The paintings extend a resistance to literal representation by leaving hints of the artist’s attachments and references.

Srouji employs color and marks as an index of time, trying to capture a state of transition, yet, always stretching a vulnerable temporal field, linking past and present. The immediacy of gesture is combined with great care for control, structure and complexity. His paintings remain contemplative, a stance in a state of inbetween.

ART DISTRICT gallery is pleased to announce hosting Rim Albahrani first solo exhibition from 25 April until 6 May 2023. The exhibition titled “Elusive Dreams of Belonging”.

The exhibition focuses on exploring themes of place, identity and belonging while questioning the categorical assumptions of home. I want to challenge preconceived notions of dislocated identities and focus beyond the borders of institutionalised structures that generalise all immigrants and diaspora alike. Unlearning these notions as their impact on these dislocated identities continues to play a limited perception of the vastness of identity formations.

Mark Hachem gallery  is pleased to announce hosting Ghazi Baker exhibition from 27 April until 20 May, 2023. The exhibition titled “Conversations”

Galerie Tanit is pleased to announce hosting Tamara Haddad and Szilard Huszank exhibition, from 3 May until 14 June, 2023.

Landscapes of the Mind: Fiction & Reality broaches the subject of Nature and Environment; an urgent and ever-growing issue most of us choose to look away from or simply ignore. Presenting a selection of works by Tamara Haddad and Szilard Huszank, this painting exhibition proposes two different viewpoints, approaches and techniques, which in reality complete each other and have similar intentions. Dual characteristics are omnipresent throughout the exhibition: beauty and destruction, factuality and imagination, figuration and abstraction, traditional and unconventional…

This exhibition brings together two different bodies of work, both focusing on nature. While Szilard Huszank presents a somewhat utopic and imaginary landscape, Tamara Haddad confronts us with a more accurate representation of our environment.

Cultural Foundation, managed by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, will organise three remarkable new exhibitions starting 3 May 2023, Pascale Marthine Tayou’s major show LOBI LOBI, its accompanying children’s exhibit BOBO LAND, and Comic Craze Vol. 3 which celebrates the rich history of Arabic comics and beloved Japanese anime.

The flagship exhibition LOBI LOBI: Pascale Marthine Tayou, which is named after the artist’s poem LOBI LOBI (2020), seeks to evoke the parallel and cyclical realities of Tayou’s practice that transcend time and territories. Featuring sculptures, mixed media, installation, poetry, and photography, the exhibition highlights the rich paradoxes of consumer and material cultures in the artist’s reformulation of his visual environment.

LOBI LOBI is divided into four sections that follow Tayou’s multiplicities of object and language as he navigates human ecologies:

The Margin to the Centre explores Tayou’s artistic process by which he seeks to reconfigure everyday objects into living testaments of our environmental damage, and global histories. Through a tornado of colourful aluminum pieces, the artist invites an overwhelming sense of both amusement and loss.

Power Vessels showcases the artist’s contemporary crystal sculptures, which reinterpret west-central African sculptural figures. By embellishing his glass sculptures and masks in everyday found objects, he creates his own personalised authenticity in each of them, resulting in new depositaries of history.

Fantasia Urbaine demonstrates Tayou’s take on the spiritual meaning of continuity and healing, leading to new interpretations of material and an impactful exchange between community nature and the environment. This section also features a video installation of the artist’s Fantasia Urbaine, a parade he organised in 2007 to celebrate Cameroon’s street vendors.

The accompanying children-focused exhibit BOBO LAND: Pascale Marthine Tayou leads young visitors into an exploration of the self through the eyes of ‘Bobo,’ Tayou’s persona of a dreaming child discovering and inventing their future. Through a series of interactive and engaging installations, children will actively take part in a dream where they will play and get the chance to reinvent who they are, what they want to be, and what they will become.

The exhibitions are curated by members of the Culture Sector at DCT Abu Dhabi, curators Maisa Al Qassimi, Noor Almehairbi and Reem AlHashmi.

Comic Craze sheds light the evolution in style and content of Arabic comics and satirical cartoons from the 1800s to the present day. Featuring the creations of 49 UAE-based artists, visitors can explore creative illustration and animation ranging from historical comic magazines to popular Japanese anime productions that were dubbed into Arabic in the 1980s. The impact of such productions extended beyond providing entertaining narratives for children; their content is rich with deep humanitarian messaging and engaging soundtracks that continue to echo among generations from the Arab world.

Visitors will get the chance to meet new characters and protagonists inspired by modern local culture. Comic Craze also includes interactive elements such as screens broadcasting nostalgic cartoon theme songs, character figurines, and a photo booth equipped with comic props.

The exhibition is curated by members of the Culture Sector at DCT Abu Dhabi, curator Sumayya Al Suwaidi, and assistant curator Aysha Al Aseeri.

Galerie Tanit is thrilled to announce the opening of Landscapes of the Mind Fiction & Reality with works by Tamara Haddad and Szilard Huszank.

Presenting a selection of works by Tamara Haddad and Szilard Huszank, this painting exhibition proposes two different viewpoints, approaches and techniques, which in reality complete each other and have similar intentions. Dual characteristics are omnipresent throughout the exhibition: beauty and destruction, factuality and imagination, figuration and abstraction, traditional and unconventional.

Saleh Barakat is pleased to announce hosting Shawki Youssef exhibition, from 4 May until 3 June, 2023.

Peeled paper and pulled fabric, Youssef’s work is a labour to expose and un-master color and medium while bringing psychic traces and images to the fore. The works call for a procession beginning with Youssef’s collaboration with Jack Dabaghian. Photographic plates depicting sublime trees stand as their own ghostly apparitions, while their prints, stained by Koranic verses, are once again reified. From trees that transform into phantasmatic images to stains that conjure an entire landscape, Youssef’s works stand as procedures that penetrate the no-man’s-land of the trace, the layer, the fold and the stain.

Peeling through the surfaces of his works in a hallucinatory succession, Youssef’s constructions unveil a new sublime in exploiting the painterly mark, the texture as creased skins revealing the infinitude of the limits of materials.

This exhibition features a collaboration with Jack Dabaghian at The Upper Gallery.

Sfeir-Semler is very happy to announce RAYYANE TABET’s solo exhibition opening in our Beirut gallery on Thursday May 4, 2023, from 6 to 8 pm.

The Return is an immersive installation that completely transforms the vast exhibition space of Sfeir-Semler Beirut, turning it into a foreign stratosphere. Stepping into the gallery, visitors are immediately bathed in a blue haze that engulfs objects and people alike and magically transforms their appearances. After the eyesight has adjusted to the dimmed setting, one distinguishes awe-inspiring, larger-than-life images of a bull’s head, that look like reliefs on a series of 8 symmetrically built free-standing walls.

The exhibition investigates the journey of a marble sculpture, dated ca. 360 B.C. that was unearthed during the excavation of the temple of Eshmun in Saida in July 1967. A month earlier, in June of that same year, the Arab-Israeli war had impacted the whole Middle East, and its reverberations are still felt today.