Event Type : Agenda

More than five decades of work by the prolific Lebanese artist Aref El Rayess (1928 – 2005) is presented in the artist’s first major institutional exhibition to date.

More than five decades of work by the prolific Lebanese artist Aref El Rayess (1928 – 2005) is presented in the artist’s first major institutional exhibition to date. The exhibition includes a wide range of painting, drawing, sculpture and collage that together reveal the rich and complex artistic practice of this important Arab modernist.

A restless traveller, El Rayess’s oeuvre often reflects the places and times in which he lived and worked. From the early influences of his years spent between Lebanon and Senegal, his travels and studies through Europe and the United States, through his return to the Arab world, the artist captured the essence of the world around him in a body of work that is anchored in his deep inner-self. While much of his work reflects the political struggles of his time—the Algerian War of Independence, the Lebanese civil war—the artist was also an active member of the engaged Lebanese art community, teaching, writing, organising and participating in conferences and exhibitions on politics and arts in the Arab World.

Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Sharjah Museums Authority with the support of the Aref El Rayess Estate and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg.

Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation

Image caption: Aref El Rayess, Technologies et revolution, 1968. From “Blood and freedom”. Oil on canvas, 139 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the Aref El Rayess estate and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg

‘Daydreams’ is Fahd Burki’s first survey exhibition, bringing together works spanning the last fifteen years of the artist’s practice. Burki’s paintings, drawings and sculptures are inspired by a wide range of influences including architecture, nature and various strands of contemporary popular culture. The selection of works range from his figurative work, through to abstraction, and a selection of commissioned reliefs.

The early figurative works are playfully executed using flat graphic colours, symbols and shapes. Over the years, his practice has evolved through slight variations and reductions resulting in more minimalist abstract compositions consisting of grids, lines and blank spaces; created using subtle materials to make barely visible marks and light washes.

In his more recent works, Burki explores the space between painting and sculpture, through a new series of commissioned reliefs. He reduces the work to its most essential elements, focusing on materiality, with an emphasis on weight and form.
A publication featuring commissioned texts by Murtaza Vali, Saira Ansari and Dawn Ross will accompany the exhibition.

Courtesy of Jameel Arts Centre

Feature image: Fahd Burki, Untitled, 1100×500 cm

Alienarium 5 is a speculative environment that invites us to imagine possible encounters with extraterrestrials.

The exhibition is a culmination of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s decades-long interest in science fiction, and her continued research into deep space and alien life. Drawing on a wide range of references from music, literature, film, architecture and pop culture, the artist creates densely layered environments that transport viewers into alternative narrative, temporal and psychological dimensions.

A multi-user VR piece contemplates new forms of connection through alien embodiment, while an immersive 360-degree collage titled Metapanorama uses outer space as a framework to bring humans, nonhumans and extraterrestrials together. With live apparitions appearing at various points during the exhibition, Alienarium 5 blurs the lines between past and present, and between what is real and imagined.

Courtesy of Serpentine Galleries

Feature: Alienarium 5 exhibition by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Zilberman | Berlin is delighted to announce the solo exhibition When I see the future, I close my eyes: Chapter II by Heba Y. Amin and curated by Anthony Downey.

Heba Y. Amin’s research-based practice proposes speculative, often satirical, approaches to examining how ideals of ‘progress’ have been advanced through the various technologies of colonization. Foregrounding interdisciplinary methods and performative investigations, When I see the future, I close my eyes: Chapter II presents a series of works that explore the political determinations of these technologies and how they define contemporary frames of representation.

Starting with the story of the first known photograph taken on the African continent in 1839, the exhibition addresses the history of machinic vision as a means for advancing the political and discursive ambitions of colonial exploitation. Windows on the West (2019), a woven reconstruction of a French orientalist painter’s photograph, portrays the exterior of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s harem palace in Alexandria. Although there was nothing erotic about the image, its contrived sexual implications excited audiences in Paris at the time. The original photograph, upon which this work is based, came to represent France’s domination over a territory through the subjugation of North African women. Restaging this historical context, Windows on the West (2019) examines how the extractive technologies of colonial vision can be reconsidered from within their structural logic.

Alluding to similar elements, including the territorialisation of space, The Devil’s Garden (2019 -ongoing) explores how colonial violence is engendered through both the material and immaterial occupation of future realities. Examining narratives relating to the German Afrika Korps and their lingering presence in northern Egypt, this project observes how, during the WWII campaign in al-Alamein, millions of landmines were planted by Erwin Rommel’s army. Through her research and fieldwork in what remains one of the most landmine-infested regions in the world, Amin came across a peculiar pyramid built by the Luftwaffe to commemorate a WWII German fighter pilot. By creating a replica of the Nazi-era memorial and bringing it back to Germany, the artist inverts the historical framing of these events and focuses on how European propaganda, perpetuated by mainstream films in particular, continues to disavow responsibility for the techno-fossils that remain in the aftermath of colonial violence.

Amin’s newest work in the exhibition confronts France’s nuclear experiments in Algeria and the far-reaching impact of radioactive fallout. A haunting photograph from 1960 depicts two rows of human-like figures awaiting the detonation of an atomic bomb in the Algerian desert. Through a miniature model and live photo reconstruction of the original image, Atom Elegy (2022) captures the anticipation of nuclear violence pending in real-time. The catastrophic vision of nuclear destruction, a potent symbol of hubristic modernity, is both sublimated and foregrounded as a testimony to the colonial legacies of territorial destruction and, crucially, the neocolonial will to occupy the future.

Initially launched in 2020 by Heba Y. Amin and Anthony Downey at the Mosaic Rooms London, When I see the future, I close my eyes is a collaborative platform that explores art- and exhibition-making as a methodology for new and ongoing research aimed at broadening conversations around the emerging forms of digital authoritarianism and the post-digital future of technologies of warfare. With a commitment to publishing content emerging out of the exhibitions’ themes, When I see the future reflects upon the history of technology and its role in shaping Western visuality.

Courtesy of Zilberman | Berlin

The Third Line is pleased to present Sara Naim’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Rose Tinted introduces a new body of work featuring photographs based on utopian scenes that don’t entirely correspond with their sculpted forms. For the last time after six years, Naim uses plexiglass, wood and print in her wall and floor-based artworks, which contain imagery related to food, land, and objects depicted in an idealised form.

Traversing both gallery floors, a tension arises between the perception of something and its existence. Against the stark truth, however, any utopian notion is soon overturned. The human tendency to project one’s own vision onto the world, for example to visualise it in a softer, forgiving light, often means tinted lenses generate a mask.

Naim analyses how our viewpoints are shaped by our perception, and how we rarely regard anything as it genuinely is. Both consciously and unconsciously, we project our expectations, desires or aversions onto an experience, in turn, that influences our individual narrative of truth. Greek philosopher Plato’s Theory of Forms (308 BC) provides a framework for this artist’s examination of delusion and reality by means of simplified, cartoonish language. All we witness, according to Plato, takes the form of an ideal beyond time and space that can only be accessed by the mind.

There are a variety of colliding images on the ground floor, from the communal Table Scene (2021) to the intimate Bouquet Scene (2021). In the first, lemons perch haphazardly atop an uneven bowl, distorted and distended along the dripping tablecloth. In the second, a bouquet of six distinct flowers is presented, held by a hand that also grasps two tiny blossoms. By enlarging the scale of the bouquet, it embodies an overwhelming expression of love and emotional offering.

A sense of déjà vu dominates the upper floor, as the mind recalls the expectations from downstairs. In Apero Scene (2021), a grazing platter featuring cheese, grapes, and wine evokes the excitement of a Parisian feast.

Each artwork is divided and united by visible silver screws. In doing so, she highlights the isolation of the elements and provides a metaphor to the constructed image. Yet the back is composed of a singular continuous piece of wood, providing unity among fragmentations. Two sides of visual perception are put into stark relief: the nostalgic aspects of rose-coloured vision clash with the freeing, but painful, truths that can be uncovered through unbiased observation. Naim’s exhibition illustrates the idea and act of pure observation to achieve a both meaningful and memorable sight, without actually being either.

Words by Vanessa Murrell

Courtesy of The Third Line

Feature: Sara Naim, Lightwave Scene, 2021,Plexiglass, C-type digital print, wood, 172 x 109.6 cm, Edition of 1, 1AP

The Sherbet Project revolves around a syrup for a drink that my late maternal aunt used to make, using mint, apple cider vinegar, sugar and water. I have been trying to replicate this recipe of the drink from my memory, a drink that I used to love as a child at my aunt’s home. In this process of measuring, mixing, cooking, stirring, playing, smelling, tasting, remembering, and replicating, what did I arrive at?

And is the arrival at a particular place or a point important? To that perfect recipe of Sekanjabeen; the right ratio of mint to vinegar to sugar; to that smell that would pervade her kitchen, the apartment air and all the linen in her house; to that whiff of vinegar that is left behind as an aftertaste in your mouth; to that dark gold hue that glistens in the faintest light; or to that perfect sticky consistency where the syrup mistakenly sticks to your fingers, only for you to lick it clean and get an instant hit of the past.

It may have been about these arrivals when this journey towards the sherbet began. However, soon after, the process became about the stops in between. About those moments of slowing down to pay attention and care. It turned to revisiting a life that has been, and reconfiguring and reimagining what this woman’s life perhaps could and should have been. It looks into rooms to pause and to acknowledge; at those overlooked dust-filled crevices; at the enamel paint chipping off the walls in her apartment; peeks into her cabinets, receptacles and repositories and the stale air that they still hold; and stares at those photographs glossing with smears of flash, and in this process of looking, it tries to bear witness. It attempts to sink into her belongings, longings and desires and makes a wish or two. And somewhere in the midst of looking at her and back at her life, one perhaps may end up looking back and ahead at the course of their own.

This sherbet project, is a constellation of unfinished thoughts; a play; a walk; a mirror gazing back; a desire; a wish; a gift; an homage; a mourning; and a living, breathing and an ephemeral monument to Zareen.

Courtesy of Grey Noise Gallery

Embryonic Coat is the third solo exhibition by Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (b. 1962, UAE) to be shown at the gallery. Here Ibrahim explores the conception or manifestation of the known, experienced, or imagined, as contained within rudimentary forms. The title references the protective sheath around a seed or the membrane around an embryo.

The exhibition runs concurrently with Ibrahim’s major new installation for The National Pavilion UAE at the 59th Venice Biennale – Between Sunrise and Sunset – a room-filling sculpture made from 128 abstract and organic elements in his signature medium of papier-maché.

Such was the scale of the Venice commission that Ibrahim spent ever more time in and around his home studio and its adjoining garden, with its old trees, flower beds and potted plants. As always, what inspired him were his surroundings, and so naturally, his new series of paintings (entitled My Garden’s Details) fixates on these plants. They become his central motif, endlessly repeated, reconfigured and recoloured, much as the abstract notations in his Symbols paintings and murals, or the vertical marks in his Lines works. Although often regimented, as with all of Ibrahim’s works these plants are somehow also treated individually and with tenderness.

Showing alongside are recent papier-maché sculptures. His three-dimensional works materialize spontaneously through weeks of experimentation with various materials, using coloured or black and white paper, though often mixing in leaves, grass, tea, coffee, or tobacco to produce nuanced natural and neutral tones. Some are anthropomorphic and dynamic – others emerge as organic plant-like forms, and some are toy-like. Whereas a few clearly relate to those in the Venice installation, in contrast to it, here we are presented with an eclectic range of objects – trees, combs, robots, various humanoid figures, flowers etc. The interchangeability of titles underlines the flexibility and mutability of Ibrahim’s visual language.

Rooted in his former semi-figural investigations, the new body of work presented in Embryonic Coat is quintessential of Ibrahim’s practice – the intuitive repetition of mark-making and forms in his paintings, the automatic almost subconscious object-making of his sculptures are both analogues to organic growth.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

Feature: Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, My Garden’s Details, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Lawrie Shabibi. Photo by Ismail Noor of Seeing Things

Modern-day paper forms are traced back to first-century Chinese official Cai Lun, who revolutionised how it is made. However, some historians claim that Cai Lun’s invention arrived in the Middle East during the eighth century, after Abbasid forces captured Chinese papermakers in present-day Kazakhstan. Utilised in the Middle East since then—for example, as an essential surface in Islamic art—paper has provided painters, draftsmen, and printmakers with endless image-making possibilities, thus shaping a significant subcategory of the region’s art history.

In the Footsteps of Cai Lun II: Selected Works on Paper assembles a group of painters and artists who have used drawing and printmaking as primary media. The exhibition features Tammam Azzam, Nihad Al-Turk, Mohammad Bozorgi, Thaier Helal, Samia Halaby, Athier Mousawi, and Faisal Samra. Through the included works, viewers will discover how drawings, whether created with graphite, charcoal, pastels, or monoprint techniques, rely heavily on the delicate yet sturdy material qualities of paper, a surface that, although unassuming, has a presence on its own, often through texture.

Recent works by Athier Mousawi, Nihad Al-Turk, Mohammad Bozorgi, Khaled Takreti, and Tammam Azzam exemplify how paper continues to be used as a surface that can mirror the implied materiality of an image. While Nihad’s labored portraits of dissident Syrians reveal the manic nature of the painter’s hand as he depicts stylised figures with meticulous detail using a ballpoint pen. Takreti also portrays detailed figures yet does so with oil on paper; in this triptych, the paper’s delicacy emanates serenity. Finally, Azzam’s black and white monoprints resemble photographic negatives, transforming his familiar subject matter into sinister imagery that connotes an alarming sense of foreboding, as they were created shortly before the Syrian conflict.

Samia has always been fond of the medium. For decades, she has relied on it, providing an area of experimentation, studies of color, and spatial composition, early in her career. The chosen works showcase the versatility of the medium, one being a painted silkscreen proof while the other is simply acrylic on paper. Similarly, Athier’s works are studies of colour and spatial composition.

Moustafa Fathi’s mixed-media paintings on paper, although applied with a brush, are reminiscent of a monoprint technique that he based on research of textiles in his native Syria. Faisal and Thaier’s works primarily showcase paper’s malleability; the result is conceptual and encompasses gestural abstraction. Assembling these drawings and prints provides a glimpse into essential but often overlooked media.

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Feature: Nihad Al-Turk, The Vanquished, 2015, Ink and acrylic on paper

Through a range of carefully selected works from artists around the world, the exhibition forms a dialogue between the different practices and materials used by each artist. The works are linked by a common theme: the pool. The pool’s influence throughout these artists’ bodies of work is palpable. Whether intentionally or coincidentally, the depiction of a pool has long stood as a symbol of luxury and leisure, a mark of indulgence.

The Swimming Pool brings together the works of these artists to explore the swimming pool as a theme of exuberance, rest, awakening and more. The show features work by the gallery’s artists Olaf Breuning, Gil Heitor Cortesāo, and Philip Mueller along with works by emerging and established artists Nazgol Ansarinia, Tamara Al Samerraei, Maria Bußmann, Alexei Alexander Izmaylov, and Sultan Al Remeithi.

Gil Heitor Cortesāo takes mundane imagery and gives it a nostalgic essence by creating his works using oil on transparent Plexiglas. With textural brushstrokes and painterly narratives, Cortesāo offers his viewers visual disjunctions. The pool, a recurring theme in Cortesāo’s private home landscapes – which have been appropriated from iconic architectures of the 60’s and 70’s – emanates a certain calmness through his use of a muted palette and depiction of serene environments.

Many scenes in Philip Mueller’s invented locale are accompanied by the vision of a pool. Some full and others empty, it remains for the artist that the pool symbolizes rest, rejuvenation, and decadence. The members of his imagined hedonist gang, the Black Flamingo Sad Boys, have found refuge in the pools of Tiberio Beach Resort, a geographically changing place, which occupies Mueller’s mind and is inspired by the gang’s journey to the end of the world.

With a crafty, over-simplified approach, the works of Olaf Breuning explore the more literal impact of man-made luxuries on the environment. Using woodcut depictions of the natural world, Breuning creates a distressing contrast of the harsh realities of climate change created by the ever-evolving human civilization.

Dominated by architectural components, minimalism, and observation, Nazgol Ansarinia’s work is a striking comment on urbanity and mass consumerism. In Tehran, where the artist is from, it is not uncommon to witness the gentrification of the city, where traditional buildings and structures get demolished to make way for the new. These works are a statement on the intertwining of personal experiences with the larger social context.

Oscillating between, and often mixing the principals of, a myriad of materials, such as painting, photography, video, and installation, Tamara Al Samerraei’s personal and intimate works depict objects that are stripped down to their bare essence. Emanating an intense, quintessential psychological charge throughout the visceral rawness of the canvas, the artist uses rich, obscure pigments that envelope the composition, with fiery bright details that draw the viewer’s attention around the opus.

Maria Bußmann’s works occupy the sensuality of a dream state — fantastical imagery caught in the wind of thought. Small yet mighty depictions of different landscapes and characters inhabit Bußmann’s compositions created in tiny tins and draw on themes of philosophy and literature.

Alexei Alexander Izmaylov investigates ideas of dreams and escapism with his playful, miniature set-like installations that evoke a sense of naïveté. Using toys, wooden blocks, and cutouts, the artist photographs these compositions on the now obsolete medium: Fujifilm instant peel-apart film.

With a practice bound by color, personal experience, experimentation, and documentation, Sultan Al Remeithi’s work emits a certain comfort in depicting the known. Based off Polaroid pictures the artist took of his confinement space during quarantine, Al Remeithi finds beauty and life in things that may otherwise seem trite.

In reflecting on the swimming pool as an icon of modernism and social status, we can see the suburban desire to own a backyard watering hole. A pool is water made available and useful through its domestication. A pool is making invisible water visible by painting its container blue.

Courtesy of Carbon 12 Gallery

Feature: Gil Heitor Cortesāo, Backyard Pool (Orange), 2022. Oil on plexiglass, 52 x 50 cm.

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai titled Inner Sanctuary by the young Palestinian artist Rana Samara. Opening on 22nd of May; the exhibition showcases a body of work focusing on the exploration of the artist’s own intimate space from an emotional perspective.

Samara depicts the inside of her world with fine details incorporating daily objects and furnishing. She explores her personal space; the lounge, the bedroom, the corners in her favourite café and other familiar places. Samara uses colours, motifs, and shapes to convey her sentiments. By doing so she is showing either her content, calmness, anxiety, or frustration – leaving out one central aspect: humans. Her series is a bid to capture traces of precious moments that people leave behind. Her paintings are clearly influenced by her deep sentiments towards those places.

The work is executed using the artist’s unique signature of charming vibrant colours and stunning decorative motifs. The exhibition presents large paintings as well as small sized ones on the contrary to her previous exhibitions which consisted of large scale canvases.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

Feature: Rana Samara, Untitled 1, 2022. Acrylic and spray print on canvas, 30 x 40 cm. Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

Yearning embodies the conflicting being navigating in time and space. In perpetual motion, one comes to be through constant phenomenological transformations. In her multi-media exhibited works, Azza Abo Rebieh deconstructs the struggles of the being, “that is the rhythm of the flutter of her wings give and take, make the path of her movements like a heartbeat and its eagerness, yearning, thirsty, to do everything and nothing…” Through her words and works of art, Abo Rebieh dismantles and reconnects the parts of one’s being. In this current exhibition Abo Rebieh puts on display a myriad of sketches, prints, paintings and watercolour, unveiling the transformability of the body by means of artistic endeavors. The Yearning exhibition is also the host of Nelsy Massoud’s sculpture titled Metamorphosis which will be exhibited at The Upper Gallery at Saleh Barakat Gallery, ground floor.

In Metamorphosis, invited artist Nelsy Massoud expands on the transformative aspect of the being. Existence is performative and metamorphic, entailing a constant assertion of the being through the mutability of the self. Similarly, “caterpillars turn into butterflies,” or when “materials take new forms,” the structural loofahs bare new life forms.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

Feature: Azza Abo Rebieh, Awaiting, 2022. Tulles and thread on canvas, 110 x 150 cm.

A selection of works by Bahram Hajou from 2003 to 2010.
There is an unusual ease in Bahram Hajou’s work. A soft gaze at the viewer hiding deep emotions and conflicts of gender and identity.

A German specialist and art critic Walter Schurian attributes to Bahram Hajou an artistic competence from a technical, iconographic, aesthetic and expressive point of view which gives the painter incomparable power and a unique status.

According to Walter Schurian, Bahram Hajou’s art is the art of the instant of immediacy. In appearance, the representation developed by Hajou is of the order of a sketch… only apparently! It is frontal… It moves in a whiteness of snow… It is light. His elements develop “thrifty” figures in form and massiveness. Bahram Hajou is considered a great painter of the desert of his origins but of an unequaled expressive richness who does not seek to achieve forms and finished figures through his details but with approaches of proximity… abstract, on the surface!

Whether it is thought to have fallen from the skies or extracted from the abyss of the earth, the forgotten beauty of metal is quite valuable.
Géraldine’s works of art are a constant invitation to halt. The constituent elements of her works propose a unique essence inspired by her maritime navigations.
Captivated by the characteristics of ore, she goes on an experimental exploration of textures, colours, contrasts, forms and reflections within the walls of her workshop in Beirut. Thus, these minerals, entice to venture on mesmerising discoveries of myriad aspects related to them.
Originally from the Drôme, it is in the French southern town of Sète where she discovered the work of Pierre Soulages, her ultimate inspiration.

39 years old Géraldine Blache offers the vulnerability, fragility, and rawness of the mineral material in her works, stimulated by her understanding of the notion of time and natural transformations. After having settled in Lebanon in 2012, she has been actively creating and engaging with her preferred material.

Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery

Feature: Geraldine Blache, Untitled, 2019. Steel, 100 x 200 cm.

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to introduce its first virtual exhibition titled Bending Toward the Sun by the Palestinian young artist Yazan Abu Salameh. In this exhibition, Abu Salameh attempts to navigate barriers to freedom by depicting enormous suns in his artworks overlooking structures of concrete as representations of military occupation. The exhibition attempts to pound on the concrete walls as a legitimate cry for justice and a bid to break out of confinement boxes.

Ziad Anani, Zawyeh’s Director, expresses his enthusiasm for the new approach, that the Gallery is taking. He said “We are planning to organize virtual exhibitions throughout the year along with physical exhibitions in our branches in Dubai and Ramallah. We are looking forward to providing the audience with an amazing virtual experience as well as the opportunity to view the exhibitions from different parts of the world”. He adds “the technology of virtual exhibitions has developed tremendously in the past years and as a gallery, we are keeping up with these developments and bringing the best of experiences to our art collectors. The technology we use grants the audience a high-quality viewing experience that is very close to reality. Visitors can now tour the venue and see the details of the works including having a close look at the materials, the captions of the artworks, price lists etc. in a straightforward and convenient way. They can choose when to view the exhibition despite their location.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

More than five decades of work by the prolific Lebanese artist Aref El Rayess (1928 – 2005) is presented in the artist’s first major institutional exhibition to date.

More than five decades of work by the prolific Lebanese artist Aref El Rayess (1928 – 2005) is presented in the artist’s first major institutional exhibition to date. The exhibition includes a wide range of painting, drawing, sculpture and collage that together reveal the rich and complex artistic practice of this important Arab modernist.

A restless traveller, El Rayess’s oeuvre often reflects the places and times in which he lived and worked. From the early influences of his years spent between Lebanon and Senegal, his travels and studies through Europe and the United States, through his return to the Arab world, the artist captured the essence of the world around him in a body of work that is anchored in his deep inner-self. While much of his work reflects the political struggles of his time—the Algerian War of Independence, the Lebanese civil war—the artist was also an active member of the engaged Lebanese art community, teaching, writing, organising and participating in conferences and exhibitions on politics and arts in the Arab World.

Organised by Sharjah Art Foundation and Sharjah Museums Authority with the support of the Aref El Rayess Estate and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg.

Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation

Image caption: Aref El Rayess, Technologies et revolution, 1968. From “Blood and freedom”. Oil on canvas, 139 x 200 cm. Courtesy of the Aref El Rayess estate and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg

‘Daydreams’ is Fahd Burki’s first survey exhibition, bringing together works spanning the last fifteen years of the artist’s practice. Burki’s paintings, drawings and sculptures are inspired by a wide range of influences including architecture, nature and various strands of contemporary popular culture. The selection of works range from his figurative work, through to abstraction, and a selection of commissioned reliefs.

The early figurative works are playfully executed using flat graphic colours, symbols and shapes. Over the years, his practice has evolved through slight variations and reductions resulting in more minimalist abstract compositions consisting of grids, lines and blank spaces; created using subtle materials to make barely visible marks and light washes.

In his more recent works, Burki explores the space between painting and sculpture, through a new series of commissioned reliefs. He reduces the work to its most essential elements, focusing on materiality, with an emphasis on weight and form.
A publication featuring commissioned texts by Murtaza Vali, Saira Ansari and Dawn Ross will accompany the exhibition.

Courtesy of Jameel Arts Centre

Feature image: Fahd Burki, Untitled, 1100×500 cm

Alienarium 5 is a speculative environment that invites us to imagine possible encounters with extraterrestrials.

The exhibition is a culmination of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s decades-long interest in science fiction, and her continued research into deep space and alien life. Drawing on a wide range of references from music, literature, film, architecture and pop culture, the artist creates densely layered environments that transport viewers into alternative narrative, temporal and psychological dimensions.

A multi-user VR piece contemplates new forms of connection through alien embodiment, while an immersive 360-degree collage titled Metapanorama uses outer space as a framework to bring humans, nonhumans and extraterrestrials together. With live apparitions appearing at various points during the exhibition, Alienarium 5 blurs the lines between past and present, and between what is real and imagined.

Courtesy of Serpentine Galleries

Feature: Alienarium 5 exhibition by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Modern-day paper forms are traced back to first-century Chinese official Cai Lun, who revolutionised how it is made. However, some historians claim that Cai Lun’s invention arrived in the Middle East during the eighth century, after Abbasid forces captured Chinese papermakers in present-day Kazakhstan. Utilised in the Middle East since then—for example, as an essential surface in Islamic art—paper has provided painters, draftsmen, and printmakers with endless image-making possibilities, thus shaping a significant subcategory of the region’s art history.

In the Footsteps of Cai Lun II: Selected Works on Paper assembles a group of painters and artists who have used drawing and printmaking as primary media. The exhibition features Tammam Azzam, Nihad Al-Turk, Mohammad Bozorgi, Thaier Helal, Samia Halaby, Athier Mousawi, and Faisal Samra. Through the included works, viewers will discover how drawings, whether created with graphite, charcoal, pastels, or monoprint techniques, rely heavily on the delicate yet sturdy material qualities of paper, a surface that, although unassuming, has a presence on its own, often through texture.

Recent works by Athier Mousawi, Nihad Al-Turk, Mohammad Bozorgi, Khaled Takreti, and Tammam Azzam exemplify how paper continues to be used as a surface that can mirror the implied materiality of an image. While Nihad’s labored portraits of dissident Syrians reveal the manic nature of the painter’s hand as he depicts stylised figures with meticulous detail using a ballpoint pen. Takreti also portrays detailed figures yet does so with oil on paper; in this triptych, the paper’s delicacy emanates serenity. Finally, Azzam’s black and white monoprints resemble photographic negatives, transforming his familiar subject matter into sinister imagery that connotes an alarming sense of foreboding, as they were created shortly before the Syrian conflict.

Samia has always been fond of the medium. For decades, she has relied on it, providing an area of experimentation, studies of color, and spatial composition, early in her career. The chosen works showcase the versatility of the medium, one being a painted silkscreen proof while the other is simply acrylic on paper. Similarly, Athier’s works are studies of colour and spatial composition.

Moustafa Fathi’s mixed-media paintings on paper, although applied with a brush, are reminiscent of a monoprint technique that he based on research of textiles in his native Syria. Faisal and Thaier’s works primarily showcase paper’s malleability; the result is conceptual and encompasses gestural abstraction. Assembling these drawings and prints provides a glimpse into essential but often overlooked media.

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Feature: Nihad Al-Turk, The Vanquished, 2015, Ink and acrylic on paper

Through a range of carefully selected works from artists around the world, the exhibition forms a dialogue between the different practices and materials used by each artist. The works are linked by a common theme: the pool. The pool’s influence throughout these artists’ bodies of work is palpable. Whether intentionally or coincidentally, the depiction of a pool has long stood as a symbol of luxury and leisure, a mark of indulgence.

The Swimming Pool brings together the works of these artists to explore the swimming pool as a theme of exuberance, rest, awakening and more. The show features work by the gallery’s artists Olaf Breuning, Gil Heitor Cortesāo, and Philip Mueller along with works by emerging and established artists Nazgol Ansarinia, Tamara Al Samerraei, Maria Bußmann, Alexei Alexander Izmaylov, and Sultan Al Remeithi.

Gil Heitor Cortesāo takes mundane imagery and gives it a nostalgic essence by creating his works using oil on transparent Plexiglas. With textural brushstrokes and painterly narratives, Cortesāo offers his viewers visual disjunctions. The pool, a recurring theme in Cortesāo’s private home landscapes – which have been appropriated from iconic architectures of the 60’s and 70’s – emanates a certain calmness through his use of a muted palette and depiction of serene environments.

Many scenes in Philip Mueller’s invented locale are accompanied by the vision of a pool. Some full and others empty, it remains for the artist that the pool symbolizes rest, rejuvenation, and decadence. The members of his imagined hedonist gang, the Black Flamingo Sad Boys, have found refuge in the pools of Tiberio Beach Resort, a geographically changing place, which occupies Mueller’s mind and is inspired by the gang’s journey to the end of the world.

With a crafty, over-simplified approach, the works of Olaf Breuning explore the more literal impact of man-made luxuries on the environment. Using woodcut depictions of the natural world, Breuning creates a distressing contrast of the harsh realities of climate change created by the ever-evolving human civilization.

Dominated by architectural components, minimalism, and observation, Nazgol Ansarinia’s work is a striking comment on urbanity and mass consumerism. In Tehran, where the artist is from, it is not uncommon to witness the gentrification of the city, where traditional buildings and structures get demolished to make way for the new. These works are a statement on the intertwining of personal experiences with the larger social context.

Oscillating between, and often mixing the principals of, a myriad of materials, such as painting, photography, video, and installation, Tamara Al Samerraei’s personal and intimate works depict objects that are stripped down to their bare essence. Emanating an intense, quintessential psychological charge throughout the visceral rawness of the canvas, the artist uses rich, obscure pigments that envelope the composition, with fiery bright details that draw the viewer’s attention around the opus.

Maria Bußmann’s works occupy the sensuality of a dream state — fantastical imagery caught in the wind of thought. Small yet mighty depictions of different landscapes and characters inhabit Bußmann’s compositions created in tiny tins and draw on themes of philosophy and literature.

Alexei Alexander Izmaylov investigates ideas of dreams and escapism with his playful, miniature set-like installations that evoke a sense of naïveté. Using toys, wooden blocks, and cutouts, the artist photographs these compositions on the now obsolete medium: Fujifilm instant peel-apart film.

With a practice bound by color, personal experience, experimentation, and documentation, Sultan Al Remeithi’s work emits a certain comfort in depicting the known. Based off Polaroid pictures the artist took of his confinement space during quarantine, Al Remeithi finds beauty and life in things that may otherwise seem trite.

In reflecting on the swimming pool as an icon of modernism and social status, we can see the suburban desire to own a backyard watering hole. A pool is water made available and useful through its domestication. A pool is making invisible water visible by painting its container blue.

Courtesy of Carbon 12 Gallery

Feature: Gil Heitor Cortesāo, Backyard Pool (Orange), 2022. Oil on plexiglass, 52 x 50 cm.

Zawyeh Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai titled Inner Sanctuary by the young Palestinian artist Rana Samara. Opening on 22nd of May; the exhibition showcases a body of work focusing on the exploration of the artist’s own intimate space from an emotional perspective.

Samara depicts the inside of her world with fine details incorporating daily objects and furnishing. She explores her personal space; the lounge, the bedroom, the corners in her favourite café and other familiar places. Samara uses colours, motifs, and shapes to convey her sentiments. By doing so she is showing either her content, calmness, anxiety, or frustration – leaving out one central aspect: humans. Her series is a bid to capture traces of precious moments that people leave behind. Her paintings are clearly influenced by her deep sentiments towards those places.

The work is executed using the artist’s unique signature of charming vibrant colours and stunning decorative motifs. The exhibition presents large paintings as well as small sized ones on the contrary to her previous exhibitions which consisted of large scale canvases.

Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

Feature: Rana Samara, Untitled 1, 2022. Acrylic and spray print on canvas, 30 x 40 cm. Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery

‘Daydreams’ is Fahd Burki’s first survey exhibition, bringing together works spanning the last fifteen years of the artist’s practice. Burki’s paintings, drawings and sculptures are inspired by a wide range of influences including architecture, nature and various strands of contemporary popular culture. The selection of works range from his figurative work, through to abstraction, and a selection of commissioned reliefs.

The early figurative works are playfully executed using flat graphic colours, symbols and shapes. Over the years, his practice has evolved through slight variations and reductions resulting in more minimalist abstract compositions consisting of grids, lines and blank spaces; created using subtle materials to make barely visible marks and light washes.

In his more recent works, Burki explores the space between painting and sculpture, through a new series of commissioned reliefs. He reduces the work to its most essential elements, focusing on materiality, with an emphasis on weight and form.
A publication featuring commissioned texts by Murtaza Vali, Saira Ansari and Dawn Ross will accompany the exhibition.

Courtesy of Jameel Arts Centre

Feature image: Fahd Burki, Untitled, 1100×500 cm

Alienarium 5 is a speculative environment that invites us to imagine possible encounters with extraterrestrials.

The exhibition is a culmination of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s decades-long interest in science fiction, and her continued research into deep space and alien life. Drawing on a wide range of references from music, literature, film, architecture and pop culture, the artist creates densely layered environments that transport viewers into alternative narrative, temporal and psychological dimensions.

A multi-user VR piece contemplates new forms of connection through alien embodiment, while an immersive 360-degree collage titled Metapanorama uses outer space as a framework to bring humans, nonhumans and extraterrestrials together. With live apparitions appearing at various points during the exhibition, Alienarium 5 blurs the lines between past and present, and between what is real and imagined.

Courtesy of Serpentine Galleries

Feature: Alienarium 5 exhibition by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Modern-day paper forms are traced back to first-century Chinese official Cai Lun, who revolutionised how it is made. However, some historians claim that Cai Lun’s invention arrived in the Middle East during the eighth century, after Abbasid forces captured Chinese papermakers in present-day Kazakhstan. Utilised in the Middle East since then—for example, as an essential surface in Islamic art—paper has provided painters, draftsmen, and printmakers with endless image-making possibilities, thus shaping a significant subcategory of the region’s art history.

In the Footsteps of Cai Lun II: Selected Works on Paper assembles a group of painters and artists who have used drawing and printmaking as primary media. The exhibition features Tammam Azzam, Nihad Al-Turk, Mohammad Bozorgi, Thaier Helal, Samia Halaby, Athier Mousawi, and Faisal Samra. Through the included works, viewers will discover how drawings, whether created with graphite, charcoal, pastels, or monoprint techniques, rely heavily on the delicate yet sturdy material qualities of paper, a surface that, although unassuming, has a presence on its own, often through texture.

Recent works by Athier Mousawi, Nihad Al-Turk, Mohammad Bozorgi, Khaled Takreti, and Tammam Azzam exemplify how paper continues to be used as a surface that can mirror the implied materiality of an image. While Nihad’s labored portraits of dissident Syrians reveal the manic nature of the painter’s hand as he depicts stylised figures with meticulous detail using a ballpoint pen. Takreti also portrays detailed figures yet does so with oil on paper; in this triptych, the paper’s delicacy emanates serenity. Finally, Azzam’s black and white monoprints resemble photographic negatives, transforming his familiar subject matter into sinister imagery that connotes an alarming sense of foreboding, as they were created shortly before the Syrian conflict.

Samia has always been fond of the medium. For decades, she has relied on it, providing an area of experimentation, studies of color, and spatial composition, early in her career. The chosen works showcase the versatility of the medium, one being a painted silkscreen proof while the other is simply acrylic on paper. Similarly, Athier’s works are studies of colour and spatial composition.

Moustafa Fathi’s mixed-media paintings on paper, although applied with a brush, are reminiscent of a monoprint technique that he based on research of textiles in his native Syria. Faisal and Thaier’s works primarily showcase paper’s malleability; the result is conceptual and encompasses gestural abstraction. Assembling these drawings and prints provides a glimpse into essential but often overlooked media.

Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery

Feature: Nihad Al-Turk, The Vanquished, 2015, Ink and acrylic on paper

‘Daydreams’ is Fahd Burki’s first survey exhibition, bringing together works spanning the last fifteen years of the artist’s practice. Burki’s paintings, drawings and sculptures are inspired by a wide range of influences including architecture, nature and various strands of contemporary popular culture. The selection of works range from his figurative work, through to abstraction, and a selection of commissioned reliefs.

The early figurative works are playfully executed using flat graphic colours, symbols and shapes. Over the years, his practice has evolved through slight variations and reductions resulting in more minimalist abstract compositions consisting of grids, lines and blank spaces; created using subtle materials to make barely visible marks and light washes.

In his more recent works, Burki explores the space between painting and sculpture, through a new series of commissioned reliefs. He reduces the work to its most essential elements, focusing on materiality, with an emphasis on weight and form.
A publication featuring commissioned texts by Murtaza Vali, Saira Ansari and Dawn Ross will accompany the exhibition.

Courtesy of Jameel Arts Centre

Feature image: Fahd Burki, Untitled, 1100×500 cm