Combining large-scale clay reliefs & drawings Monika Grabuschnigg’s first solo exhibition, “What satisfaction could you possibly have”, explores the dislocated intimacies & disembodied desires of humans living in highly digitized societies.How we search for & connect with others, how we long for, flirt & fantasize together is changing dramatically. The apps & websites we turn to seem to offer direct portals to other lives – immediate & intimate interactions that can lead to in-the-flesh satisfactions. But there is no unmediated exchange: we are subject to, and encouraged to enact, self-censorship, self-exploitation. Our loves and loneliness mined for profit. Each of us put to work as blister-thumbed miner.

Both the reliefs & drawings in the show reference the ever-present screens through which this happens. We see fractured & repaired bodies morphing into one another; cropped & cracked identities exaggerated & engorged by algorithmic bias; character-limited emotions congealing into searching limbs, messy embraces, visceral gazes.Materially vulnerable, tonally fleshy, the inch-thick, flat-to-the-wall reliefs feel like substantial moments captured through a haze of distortion: the analog & digital worlds clashing head-on. The forms in the drawings are more of-this-worldly, but more deeply mired in dream-states. Created after (rather than as sketches for) the reliefs they feel like moments of surveillance: evidence gathered from tapping the data flows between the babbling ceramic.

Ayyam Gallery Dubai is pleased to present you + topia, a collective exhibition.

About the Show

Over five hundred years ago, Sir Thomas More wrote ‘Utopia’; a novel proposing an ideal form of human organisation. The word ‘utopia’ translates as ‘no place’, existing only as an unreachable state of perfection. Yet ‘no place’ is exactly how this generation feels about the idea of belonging. Instead, we live in a world where the majority of citizens have lost their hope in the existence of a system able to accommodate all of its inhabitants.

you + topia touches on cultural, social, and geo-political problems of contemporary Middle- Eastern artists. These artists use art as a battleground to reflect on anxiety and optimism, while offering a place of resistance in a climate where we co-exist between war and terror. In order to maintain identity within the ever-changing landscape between real and ideal, the artists depict their true tones through images of collapsing worlds and places of tension. In the meanwhile, the desire and expectations of a true ‘utopia’ reside on the borderline; a place of obstruction.

Featured in this exhibition are works by the artists Samia Halaby, Ginane Makki Bacho, Nadim Karam, Sadik Alfraji, Safwan Dahoul, Rula Halawani, Shurooq Amin, Thaier Helal, Farzad Kohan, Abdul-Karim Majdal al-Beik, Sama Alshaibi, Afshin Pirhashemi, Mouteea Murad, Ousama Diab, Tammam Azzam, and Athier.

Letitia Gallery is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by the British artist Nathaniel Rackowe, which takes the city of Beirut as a point of departure in order to investigate the ever-changing nature of cites, and their continual destruction and renewal.

The Shape of a City uses industrial materials such as corrugated roofing, galvanised steel and cement blocks, and combines them with artificial light; used to soften the hard edges of the mass produced materials, allowing Rackowe to explore the ways in which urban dwellers must continually adapt their behaviour in order to successfully negotiate the built landscape.

 

 

Ayyam Gallery DIFC is pleased to present our Summer Collective Exhibition – Dialogue.

About the Show

The installation brings together artworks based on a cultural dialogue between practitioners from across the Middle East. By juxtaposing colour theory, collage, figurative painting, and multidimensional imagery, the exhibition intends to cover a broad range of urgent subjects, allowing each work to offer a different exchange of ideas and conclusions.

About Ayyam Gallery

Founded in 2006, Ayyam Gallery is a leading arts organisation that manages the careers of diverse established and emerging artists. Blue-chip art spaces in Beirut and Dubai, a series of collaborative projects in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and a multinational non-profit arts programme have furthered the gallery’s mandate of expanding the parameters of international art. With its widely respected multilingual publishing division and a custodianship programme that manages the estates of pioneering artists, Ayyam Gallery has also contributed to recent efforts that document underrepresented facets of global art history.

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time…

My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention…

My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.

Wisława Szymborska

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home, presented at OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin, aims to unveil the artistic practice of Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian by focusing on their methodology, communication, and construction of their works. Over the past few decades, Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam have shared a life philosophy that has allowed for mutual creation, during which their individual practices interact with their collaborative ones and which is informed by the understanding and technical skills of other people. From the dialogues they build among themselves and with other artists, friends, and collaborators – including stage director Joan Baixas, robotic engineer John Cole, community artist Niyaz Azadikhah, film producer Mandana Mohit, and writer Nazli Ghassemi – these artists have established a personal language that has enabled them to present different layers of content and texture in their work.

Thus, a main element of their practice is human labour, including theirs, as well as a working process that involves the inclusion of different opinions, discussing and considering opposing perspectives and approaches, and mainly, experimenting with a wide range of possibilities. Drawing on the American philosopher Dan Dennett’s approach to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which is based on the notion of reverse engineering and processes of research and development, one might see the collaborative practice of these artists as a repetitive process in which every act represents another step in maturity. In other words, every new achievement – but also every new failure – that has been put forth by them or by their collaborators contributes to the latest interpretation of a work, a performance, an installation, or the presentation of an exhibition.

The current exhibition does not seek to be a retrospective or a survey of the artists’ oeuvre, but rather a demonstration of how they embrace their practice and heterogeneous sense of creation. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home is an attempt to show the work of Ramin, Rokni, and Hesam from a perspective that observes the mechanisms through which their collaborative practice is conveyed but also how it is formed during a creative process that exalts a working philosophy based on a shared reality and the inclusion of others.

The above, are excerpts, from the exhibition text written by Abaseh Mirvali and Constanza Medina.

Supported by Fondazione CRT, with the generous contribution of Alserkal Avenue, Artissima, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. In collaboration with Teatro Regio di Torino.