Event Type : Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Meem Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Courtesy of Galerie Nathalie Obadia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Ribal Molaeb

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz

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

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

Courtesy of Leila Heller Gallery

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

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

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

Courtesy of Marfa’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Grey Noise gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Carbon 12

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

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

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

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

Raquel G. Ibáñez
Mayo 2021

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

Courtesy of Sabrina Amrani Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

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

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

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

Courtesy of Marfa’

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Grey Noise gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Carbon 12

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

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

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

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

Raquel G. Ibáñez
Mayo 2021

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

Courtesy of Sabrina Amrani Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

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

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

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

Courtesy of Marfa’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Carbon 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Carbon 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery