Beneath Latent Skies
The gallery Tabari Artspace will showcase Lebanese contemporary artist, Chafa Ghaddar during art month.
The first part of a series of exhibitions by Lebanese contemporary artist, Chafa Ghaddar, is called “Beneath Latent Skies.” Ghaddar works with various media and explores the fresco mural painting technique in a contemporary way. Her art explores the tension between durability and impermanence and takes a non-linear journey that departs from the classical associations of fresco painting. In 2022, Ghaddar exhibited at the 16th Lyon Biennale under the ‘Manifesto of Fragility’, which inspired her to create site-specific works that delve into the contradictions and conflicts of her medium. “Beneath Latent Skies” is a continuation of these considerations.
The exhibition includes works that explore the body as a landscape, addressing topics such as eroticism, violence, movement, temporality, love, despair, and repair. These pieces create a tension between spaces such as flesh, land, and sky, and raise questions about the body’s promise and limitations. The artworks range in scale and medium, including installation, works on paper, wood, and fabric, and depart from the tradition and practice of fresco painting. Ghaddar’s experimentation with materiality is central to her work, and she has used techniques such as layering Indian cotton paper with coffee and tea, and carving into mural stucco with a knife blade. The artworks often appear ceramic-like but are in fact made of paper. Some of the works depict abstract scenes of passion or celebrate the human body at outsized proportions.
Through her manipulation of scale, Ghaddar’s works create metaphorical windows that invite viewers to gaze into an alternate realm or repel them from it. The exhibition presents challenging and sublime questions that preoccupy the artist. Alongside the new works, Ghaddar also exhibits historic pieces such as “Exhausted Forms” from 2022 and “Corps” from 2018, which foregrounds the human torso.
Beneath Latent Skies
Location: Dubai – United Arab Emirates
Duration: 22 February – 26 February