UNDER CONSTRUCTION 2

Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to announce the second part of Under Construction – a group exhibition presenting a series of incomplete, evolving, paradoxical, overlapping paradigms, where histories are re-evaluated, cultural artefacts re-examined, and multiple futures are explored.

Under Construction – the words denote flux and renewal, and carry with them so many associations, be it the physical acts of creating buildings and roadworks, or indeed any other project that is unfinished but actively being worked on. For the second part of this exhibition, we expand on the notion of the uncompleted project, the work in progress – often a reworking of earlier strategies, or indeed a complete break with them.

The sense of the phrase is itself endlessly mutable, appearing first in the 1800s and drawing upon the specialized use of construction to mean interpretation, through its more obvious description of the acts of building or making, to its more recent usage by web developers labelling their sites under construction while websites were being created or redone. Often accompanied by images of hardhats, hand tools, or black and yellow hazard designs, this practice, once ubiquitous, was discontinued when found to be off-putting. Language, physical projects, norms – nothing seems permanent.

Featuring works by Driss Ouadahi, Larissa Sansour, Yazan Khalili, Farhad Ahrarnia, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Mounir Fatmi, the exhibition mirrors these unstable urges and fluid histories.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi.