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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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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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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Developing long-term collaborations with workers, contractors and decision-makers, the arist takes an interest in the otherwise invisible structures of planning, construction, demolition and maintenance that shape the cities of the United Arab Emirates and beyond. His works, playful and poetic, rely on what he calls “found processes” in which the artist inserts himself, observing how individuals navigate, experiment with and bypass these systems.
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On view until February 2: “The Boundaries of Pain” is a solo exhibition by the artist Mona Jula, held at Maryam Art Gallery.
On view until February 2: In Malahat Mohebkhah’s paintings, memory is networked through emerging, resolved or tempered faces, relationships flourishing and falling apart within the corridors of the mind and time—engraves a texture of sensation of now, and a vision of future. This possibility comes from the “painterly montage” of the images.
On view until February 11: The exhibition features a collection of artworks by renowned artists, Fatemeh Emdadian and Nosratollah Moslemian, taking place at Hasht Cheshmeh Art Space.
In this major solo exhibition, the artist presents a newly commissioned large-scale installation rooted in the instability and fragility of the human experience. The installation showcases over 200 fantastical ceramic objects, culminating in surreal sculptures and structures that replicate and reimagine healthcare spaces, such as medical waiting rooms, hospital corridors, and doctors’ offices.
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Originally conceived for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, this is an immersive installation comprising film, sculpture, photography and performance, that interweaves artist’s biography with activist films produced across France, Algeria and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal moment in the history of avant-garde film production.
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On view until February 16: In her paintings, Pouran Jinchi merges traditional calligraphy techniques with abstraction, using written characters to delve into the complexities of perception, reality, and meaning.
Curated by Alireza Bayat, the exhibition pursues to provide a platform for “the Afghans” as subjects possessing political agency. The actively engaging subjects take part in a dialogue that must be mutual. Can the Afghans be heard? How to listen without falling into stereotypes or blatant simplifications? The exhibition aims to enable forms of communication that might stretch and challenge the boundaries of the dialogue itself, escaping beyond the textual, rational and Western mode of communication.
Works by Ali Rahimi, Elyas & Abdollah Jafari Alavi, Farila Neshat, Hangama Amiri, Mohsin Taasha, and Sher Ali Hosseini.
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The title opens up a moment of revitalization and renewal, introducing the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale as a nurturing entity, filled with life, while acknowledging the necessity of water for all forms of life that dwell and seek shelter on our planet. Unfolding as a combination of practices such as inhabiting, cultivating, harvesting, searching, and sharing, this Biennale presents works that engage with the human-nature continuum, examine the built environment, observe the state of our surrounding landscapes, recount histories, and encourage us to listen more closely.
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This is an exhibition about visiting and revisiting, about being physically present in the space, with the traces left by artists who have been there, or hints of those who will be there. Watch for updates, here and elsewhere.
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The first major international survey of work by Lala Rukh. The exhibition reflects on three decades of her drawing, printmaking, photography and video, produced against the backdrop of political turmoil and feminist movements in Pakistan.
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Farah’s first exhibition, featuring black and white images. “Black and white images automatically historicize,” she says. The glossy veneer of history allows us to indulge in theory immune from personal responsibility. Too often, we forget that the now we live is just the prototype for future history.
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Marking the conclusion of Ana Mazzei’s ongoing project “Love Scene Crime Scene,” a three-part exhibition series centered around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina, this latest installment presented by Green Art Gallery in Dubai, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures and oil paintings that leave the spectator wanting to play the role of investigator.
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Delving into Charbel Samuel Aoun’s exploration of matter and kinetic artistry, the exhibition highlights the artist’s unique engagement with processes of co-creation and features new productions that bring to life earth, stones, wood, and wax through motors, amplifiers, and microphones. Running through each gallery is an installation showcasing the intricate weaving between matters and the continuum of movement.
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