WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Karine Boulanger, Murmures Entre Les Branches, 2015. Oil on canvas, 130 x 195 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz.
Source: Why I Moved to the CountrysideWHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
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WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
This work seeks to rescue an ancestral ritual of gratitude to water as a vital element for humanity. No Land addresses issues around water and the environmental crises, through taking landless sea maps to create sensational sculptures that evoke spiritual objects featured in ceremony and traditions. The artwork is, therefore, activated by the artist’s position as both the fabricator and the performer of the sculpture, occupying a determination as she possesses multiple roles. This can be seen as a metaphor for resistance, where woven narratives are portrayed as a substitute for the silence of women throughout history.
Catalina Swinburn, No Land, 2019. Woven paper from landless sea maps, 180 x 150 x 40 cm. Selma Feriani Gallery. Courtesy Catalina Swinburn Studio.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Catalina Swinburn’s sensational sculptures are produced by intricately weaving together pages of texts to construct robust structures. Through this labour-intensive approach, the material is transformed from delicate pages of books to garment-like arrangements that the artist often wears as armour to perform in. The artwork is, therefore, activated by the artist’s position as both the fabricator and the performer of the sculpture, occupying a determination as she possesses multiple roles. This can be seen as a metaphor for resistance, where woven narratives are portrayed as a substitute for the silence of women throughout history.
Catalina Swinburn, Index, 2019. Woven paper investiture from vintage atlases gazetteer documentation, 180 x 150 x 40 cm. Selma Feriani Gallery. Courtesy Catalina Swinburn Studio.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
These works are part of what Samia now calls the “Dome of the Rock” series from the early 1980s. These works incorporate a strong diagonal, interlacing shapes and forms, and heavy textures.
Samia Halaby, Position Interplay, Bar and Curgde, 1983. Wax and pigment on paper, 35 x 35 cm. Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
These works are part of what Samia now calls the “Dome of the Rock” series from the early 1980s. These works incorporate a strong diagonal, interlacing shapes and forms, and heavy textures.
Samia Halaby, Position Interplay, Green, 1983. Monotype with oil, wax and pigments on paper, 45.6 x 46.6 cm. Courtesy of Ayyam Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Geitani is provoking our relation to nature and its representation in a vastly changing world. Geitani hastens our vision from the observational realm, through the symbolic, to confront us with an immediacy of existential poetry.
Bassam Geitani, Rusty Rain, 2017. Mixed media on canvas, 172 x 182 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz.
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WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Bassam Geitani is provoking our relation to nature and its representation in a vastly changing world. Geitani hastens our vision from the observational realm, through the symbolic, to confront us with an immediacy of existential poetry.
Bassam Geitani, Untitled, 2017. Mixed media on canvas, 202 x 142 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
In the Paradise Lost series Gaza-born visual artist Hazem Harb assembles fleeting glimpses into the material and natural landscape of his homeland from which he remains displaced. Through his ubiquitous process of contemporary collage he presents a dystopic vision of paradise, evacuating images of Palestine’s architecture and agriculture from their consignment to archives and hinting at the region’s underlying complexities through juxtaposition against more recent structural impositions. Harb’s practice is intended more as visual excavation than romanticisation of the Other, and through it, we can explore the paradoxical and pressured relations between people and places. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement and war, he negotiates a constructed axis of complex social and cultural relations: built and pastoral environments, modernist Bauhaus concrete and Jerusalem’s Old City walls, loss, longing and belonging.
Hazem Harb, Paradise Lost #4, 2020. C-P on Hahnemuehle Ultra Smooth archival paper 305 gsm, 60 × 80 × 3 cm. Ed. of 3 + AP. Courtesy of Tabari Artspace Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
In the Paradise Lost series Gaza-born visual artist Hazem Harb assembles fleeting glimpses into the material and natural landscape of his homeland from which he remains displaced. Through his ubiquitous process of contemporary collage he presents a dystopic vision of paradise, evacuating images of Palestine’s architecture and agriculture from their consignment to archives and hinting at the region’s underlying complexities through juxtaposition against more recent structural impositions. Harb’s practice is intended more as visual excavation than romanticisation of the Other, and through it, we can explore the paradoxical and pressured relations between people and places. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement and war, he negotiates a constructed axis of complex social and cultural relations: built and pastoral environments, modernist Bauhaus concrete and Jerusalem’s Old City walls, loss, longing and belonging.
Hazem Harb, Paradise Lost #1, 2020. C-P on Hahnemuehle Ultra Smooth archival paper 305 gsm, 60 × 80 × 3 cm. Ed. of 3 + AP. Courtesy of Tabari Artspace Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
In the Paradise Lost series Gaza-born visual artist Hazem Harb assembles fleeting glimpses into the material and natural landscape of his homeland from which he remains displaced. Through his ubiquitous process of contemporary collage he presents a dystopic vision of paradise, evacuating images of Palestine’s architecture and agriculture from their consignment to archives and hinting at the region’s underlying complexities through juxtaposition against more recent structural impositions. Harb’s practice is intended more as visual excavation than romanticisation of the Other, and through it, we can explore the paradoxical and pressured relations between people and places. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement and war, he negotiates a constructed axis of complex social and cultural relations: built and pastoral environments, modernist Bauhaus concrete and Jerusalem’s Old City walls, loss, longing and belonging.
Hazem Harb, Paradise Lost #6, 2020. C-P on Hahnemuehle Ultra Smooth archival paper 305 gsm, 60 × 80 × 3 cm. Ed. of 3 + AP. Courtesy of Tabari Artspace Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
In the Paradise Lost series Gaza-born visual artist Hazem Harb assembles fleeting glimpses into the material and natural landscape of his homeland from which he remains displaced. Through his ubiquitous process of contemporary collage he presents a dystopic vision of paradise, evacuating images of Palestine’s architecture and agriculture from their consignment to archives and hinting at the region’s underlying complexities through juxtaposition against more recent structural impositions. Harb’s practice is intended more as visual excavation than romanticisation of the Other, and through it, we can explore the paradoxical and pressured relations between people and places. Steering away from nostalgia and the fetishisation of displacement and war, he negotiates a constructed axis of complex social and cultural relations: built and pastoral environments, modernist Bauhaus concrete and Jerusalem’s Old City walls, loss, longing and belonging.
Hazem Harb, Paradise Lost #9, 2020. C-P on Hahnemuehle Ultra Smooth archival paper 305 gsm, 60 × 80 × 3 cm. Ed. of 3 + AP. Courtesy of Tabari Artspace Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
As I absorb narratives and imageries from my surroundings and fuse them into my practice, some pieces are highly personal and come from my own stories and present experiences. Lately the world has been put on hold with the Covid19 crisis. Time has been paused, and I found myself looking with fresh eyes at my immediate surroundings. During lockdown I started wandering into the complexities of interior and exterior life, constancy and change, hence the garden paintings from the ‘Still life in quarantine’ series.
Zena Assi, In my garden, 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 60 x 75 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
The artist's approach draws snapshots from her intimate memory, in order to rewind the threads of listening and looking, of reality and fiction. And this, according to the "I remember" formula, to what it offers with one hand and what it takes back with the other. Between the polyphonic framework of the first film to which three anonymous voices lend their stories, and the attempt of scripting something like a memorial blur in the second film, Nicène Kossentini brings into play the materiality of this sensitive medium that is the filmstrip.
Nicène Kossentini, I remember I was in love, 2019. Experimental 16mm colour film, Duration 32 minutes. Edition 1 of 3. Courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
The vernacular wall suggests the frame, the material, the meaning, the light. The gesture of the anonymous painter on a wall in Tunis, Tangier, Marrakech, Cairo or elsewhere, takes us back to reminiscences of such masters as Mark Rothko, Nicolas De Staël, Barnett Newman, Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Juan Miro and de many others, however, Gasteli does not attempt to improvise himself as a painter. If one consider painting as an additive method in which the artist's gesture consists in informing a neutral medium, or if we consider the blank page as the starting point of writing, for his part, he uses photography as a subtractive abstraction operated from reality.
Jellel Gasteli, Untitled (Photographies No. X), 2018. Inkjet printing on Hahnemühle paper Digital Fine Art, 125 x 125 cm. Edition 2 of 5. Courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside
WHY I MOVED TO THE COUNTRYSIDE
Mostafa Sarabi's paintings are complicated, while he employs a simple language. With ease, he puts brush-strokes and speaks of his world. A world that in itself is a painting studio, a world he seldom leaves. We need a key and a map for entering this world; we just need to look at ourselves and we see it all. He is the painter of his own land. He paints what belongs to him or what he belongs to. Painting is our border and the land is painter's. A border that is open only with precautions so only if we are entitled to be called friends, are allowed to enter and meet him and his family. We get lost in his jungle. His paintings seem to be the most familiar place in the land of nowhere. What difference does it make to ask who has put these brush-strokes on the canvas, time passes equally for all of us and paradise if we ever find it, has space for all of us.
Mostafa Sarabi, Untitled, 2019. Acrylic on mathboard, 50 x 41.4cm. Courtesy of Delghosha Gallery.
Source: Why I Moved to the Countryside