Beyond Ruptures includes works of Aref el Rayess, Jean Khalife, Samir Khaddaje, Samia Osseiran, Shafic Abboud, Said Akl, Akram Zaatari and Nesrine Khodr as a testimony and tribute to the cultural resistance led by artists, cultural workers, and art patrons, in the challenging environments Lebanon has presented over the years. Selected works in the timeline, mark important events in the lives of each artist, and act as time capsules showing different artistic practices shaped by violence.
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Selected from the Erol Tabanca Collection, the works on display share a sensibility towards optical, thermal, metamorphic, and affective phenomena surrounding sunlight and its atmospheric refractions, exploring aesthetic possibilities surrounding mimicry as a biological and cultural impulse.
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For The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches, Nairy Baghramian has created four abstract polychrome sculptures with components that seem to have washed up like flotsam and jetsam in the voids of their respective niches. The project is the artist’s first public installation in New York City and is the fourth in the series of contemporary commissions for The Met’s facade.
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Meşher’s new exhibition Istanbul as Far as the Eye Can See: Views across Five Centuries is curated by Şeyda Çetin and Ebru Esra Satıcı. Based on a selection of more than 100 rare works from the Ömer Koç Collection, the exhibition spans 500 years, from the 15th century – when Istanbul became Ottoman Empire’s capital – to the first quarter of the 20th century. Paintings and engravings showing wide-angle views, together with rare books, albums, panoramic photographs, and even souvenirs of Istanbul, offer visitors a richly varied visual record of the city. Curated by Şeyda Çetin and Ebru Esra Satıcı.
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For the first annual spatial intervention in Beirut Art Center’s central hall, artist Marwan Rechmaoui will create Municipalities, a proposal for a space within a space. An inhabited sculpture that mimics and behaves erratically and formally all at once. A self declared autonomous structure within an existing reality, Municipalities contemplates processes of lived reality and the loss of sense of time, or frozen time, that we experience when we attempt to withdraw and build worlds that offer other insights and realizations.
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This is the most comprehensive exhibition of Handan Börüteçene, whose practice has firmly focused on archaeology, history, and nature for over forty years. The title points to a geography that has inspired the artist with its land and seas as well as cultural heritage and myths: Anatolia and Thrace.
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Organized by Ashkal Alwan as part of the first chapter of “Home Works 9: A Forum on Cultural Practices,” this exhibition revisits forms of critical artmaking in Lebanon from the 1990s onward. The title is a reference to Ashkal Alwan’s inaugural project, at Sanayeh Garden, Beirut (1995). The exhibition draws on lived experiences and acts of writing a subjective history and prompts us to consider what it means to tend to Lebanon’s recent woes from the vantage point of everyday life. An accompanying film program will run bi-weekly starting in January 2024.
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Taghavi’s practice insists on positionality: where one stands determines what—and how—one sees. For the past several years, her work with talismans, calligraphy, and the Islamic occult has coalesced into a series of sculptures and paintings that strive to signify the unseen.
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On view until January 1: Raha Khosroshahi’s solo exhibition is on display at the O Gallery. A selection of her artworks are on display, giving viewers a fully immersive experience. Raha Khosroshahi frequently addresses deep subjects and arouses intense feelings in her artwork.
On view until January 2: Ali Shahbazi’s solo exhibition is on display at the Doost Art Gallery. A selection of his paintings are on display, and visitors can expect an immersive experience. Strong emotions are evoked and profound issues are frequently explored in Ali Shahbazi’s work.
On view until January 5: An exhibition called Give Your Weight To The Ground, featuring works by Emirati artist Afra Al Dhaheri at the Green Art Gallery in Dubai, UAE. The exhibition runs from November 14, 2023 to January 5, 2024. The exhibition explores the relationship between the body and the earth, and the ways in which we can reconnect with our natural environment through physical and emotional engagement.
On view until January 5: Duality is an exhibition that showcases the artistic collaboration and friendship of Nima Nabavi and Jason Seife, who share a common vision of colour, shape, and line. The exhibition features pairs of works that are similar in size and geometry, but differ in style and expression. The works are not exact replicas, but rather reflections of each other, revealing the individuality and diversity of the artists. The works are also named with palindromes, words that can be read the same way backwards and forwards, to emphasize the theme of duality and perspective.
The exhibition probes the ways in which the domestic context of a private collection can be transferred into a museum context. In so doing, it explores the possibilities of restaging and articulating the affinities created between distinct objects by means of a collector’s desires and endeavours. The exhibition, which spans the 4th and 3rd-floor galleries of Arter, brings together works by almost 400 artists, anonymous artefacts and mass-produced items, as well as multifarious objects.
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On view until January 23th: The 009821 Projects is hosting Mahmoud Saki’s solo exhibition.
On view until January 23: “On the Eaten” is a solo exhibition by the artist Negar Mortazavizadeh, showcased in the 009821 Projects from 12 to 23 January, 2024.
On view until January 23: The exhibition “Metamorphosis” featuring works by Baran Ahmadi Rad is held at at Vali Art Gallery.
On view until January 25: This exhibition showcases prints and paintings by Elmira Mirmiran. For years, she has been obsessively studied textures in her work, and for her, texture is more than a trace of things. In this series, artist uses density of layers which are sitting together or replacing each other.
On view until January 26: The group exhibition “Trio No.9” featuring works by artists Mina Mohammadi Seresht, Faride Shafiei and Sheyda Monajemi is held at Sharif Gallery.
On view until January 26th: In this series, Shafahi explores the role of Gladiolus in a collective memory. The symbolic significance of gladiolus (“the sword”, strength, power, and resistance) evolved following the war, becoming the preferred flower of state officials and in this way lost its import with the public the artist associated with.
The exhibition by Hamed Abdalla opens on January 26: Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985) was a pioneer of modern Egyptian art. For the first time in Switzerland, the Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting an exhibition to his work as part of the series FOKUS in a room in the permanent exhibition Kosmos Klee.
Solo photo exhibition at House of Lucie, Kashan.
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For the first time in Switzerland, an exhibition is devoted to the Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985), pioneer of modern Egyptian art, who lived in Europe from the 1950s. He engaged intensively with Paul Klee and experimented with various techniques, with Arabic calligraphy forming a central starting point. As an artist of the Hurufiyya movement, which developed new artistic possibilities out of the Arabic alphabet, he invented his own ‘creative words’ by combining abstraction and human forms.
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