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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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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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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The House of Lucie Kashan reveals the remarkable works of 22 contemporary photographers, winners in various categories of the 2023 International Photography Awards. Additionally, Susan Baraz has curated 30 captivating images to complement the display.
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A group exhibition featuring selected pieces from Sama Alshaibi’s ‘Carry Over’ project and sculptures by Azza Al Qubaisi. By engaging in a direct dialogue with 19th century Orientalist portrait photographs of Middle Eastern women, captured by Western photographers, the exhibition critically explores the representations of Arab women in historical images and navigates the nuanced interplay of history, power, and representation to ultimately reclaim the narratives.
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This is Basmah Felemban’s first solo exhibition, presenting across three gallery spaces a backlog of documentation, experimentation and supporting material that built her decade-long portfolio of multimedia, research-based works. From looking at theoretical aesthetics of theological architecture to Islamic cosmology, she dovetails into ideas of seen and unseen universes, tapping into psychoanalytic concepts, memory and nostalgia.
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Zeynep Kayan’s latest works, initiating a dialogue between the self and repetition, conceived during her residency at Rijksakademie.
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The exhibition presents the second part of the personal collection of Homa Zarrabi with the efforts of Hassan and Hossein Rowshanbakht.
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The solo show of the renowned painter takes place in collaboration with Etemad Gallery.
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Arash Ahmadi’s solo exhibition is taking place at Doost Gallery.
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An Installation by Tahmineh Mahdian takes place at Electric Room.
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Presenting a wide selection of works by Ozan Sağdıç (b. 1934), one of the most prominent names in the history of photography in Türkiye, the exhibition focuses on documentary photography, a widespread genre of photography in the world, while also shedding light on the country’s social, political, economic, cultural, and visual history from the 1950s to the present day.
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In 1403 Nowruz, Soo contemporary hosts an group exhibition curated by Fereydon Ave, with the presence of 56 artists, including Mohammad Hossein Ariyaei, Shiva Abazariyan, Amin Akbari, Azadeh Akhlaghi and many others, in various media. The exhibition was an aggregate of Fereydoun Ave’s personal collection and artworks by Soo artists.
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To mark the occasion of Noa Eshkol’s 100th anninversary, the Georg Kolbe Museum is presenting an exhibition showcasing the life and work of this groundbreaking choreographer and dancer, thus in a new way bringing to life the themes such as modern dance and modernist architecture. The focus is on Eshkol’s research into movement since the 1950s, choreographies, language studies, dances, textile art and the notation system she developed for human and animal movements.
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For this solo exhibition, Behrang Karimi brings new works together in a dialog in which continuities and connections emerge between painting, furniture, tapestry, drawings, and prints. These connections occasionally blend into the space of everyday life. Various events will be held during the exhibition, including a walk-through with Behrang Karimi and Kathrin Bentele, Director of the Kunstverein.
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An archival survey exhibition documenting France’s secret nuclear programme in Algeria during and after the Algerian Revolution (1954-62). This expansive research project, put together by architectural historian and exhibition maker Samia Henni, unfolds across a series of audio-visual assemblages — each consisting of maps, photographs, film, stills, documents and archival testimonies.
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Solo Exhibition of Mostafa Emami is being Held at Bandar-e Anzali city.
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In collaboration with Room for Doubts, group show of Iranian artists based in Berlin: Sara Assadi, Saba Bagheri, Afshin Chizari, Farokh Falsafi, Fariba Fathi, Mahboube Gholami, Mohsen Hazrati, Shahriar Khorasani, Mehrnaz Momeni Kaleshtari/Vesna Pepping, Golnaz Mohammadi, Ehsan Mokhtari, Mohadeseh Ozlati Moghadam, Mahsa Nejad, Golnesa Rezanezhad, Noooshin Ravanshadi, Saeed Rafiee Monfared, Rozhina Rastgoo.
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By putting in dialogue the digital works of the 1980s with recent canvases form the 2020s, the exhibition underscores the links between the different phases in the artist’s practice. It also highlights her unwavering exploration of abstraction: Samia Halaby is a very particular, innovative figure within her generation of artists. In over six decades she constantly foregrounded works and techniques and, in retrospect, was working in the zeitgeist of her time throughout her career.
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The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is inviting visitors to rediscover the diversity of 20th-century Arab modernism and to take a fresh look at the history of art scenes still little known in Europe. Through a selection of over 200 works, most of which have never before been exhibited in France, this exhibition focuses on the relationship between Arab artists and Paris throughout the 20th century. With works by Etel Adnan, Nadia Saikali, Mona Saudi, and Juliana Seraphim, among many others.
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Talk with the Curator, Baris Seyitvan, on 7:00 pm.
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In this exhibition, the invited artists, Fırat Bingöl, Havin-Al Sindy, Maryna Markova/Dr. Olesya Chayka, Mehmet Ali Boran, Muhammed Kaya, among others, convey direct messages concerning environmental issues or provoke contemplation on sustainability through their creative endeavors.
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The pre-opening will take place on April 17, 18 and 19; the awards ceremony and inauguration will be held on 20 April 2024.
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Raed Yassin delves into themes of failure, death, loss, memory, and disappearance, confronting the spectral presence that permeates both the past and the future. He evokes these existential questions through a host of familiar yet haunting figures and symbols, ranging from pop culture icons to representations of the devil, funerary-like imagery, animals, skulls, and found photographs. Among these, the presence of Beirut’s cherished Shushu adds a poignant layer, inviting viewers to contemplate the fragility and complexity of corporeal existence in the face of protracted failure and loss.
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Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere is the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The part of the exhibtion called Nucleo Storico is gathering works from 20th century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and a number of rooms will feature works from these territories, much like an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism. Around forty artists who were active in the art contexts of West Asian and North Africa such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, and Tehran, are included in the exhibition, among them Dia al-Azzawi, Huguette Caland, Gazbia Sirry, Marwan, and Bahman Mohasses.
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Artist Yto Barrada will transform the MoMA PS1 courtyard with a large-scale installation, her first major outdoor work is composed of colorful concrete blocks stacked into pyramidal towers whose lower levels visitors can sit on and explore, providing an interactive experience in the courtyard and a setting for PS1’s signature summer music series Warm Up. The sculptures’ formations draw inspiration from multiple histories of surmounting barricades and retooling architectures: the construction of human pyramids in Morocco, Moroccan Brutalism, and Barrada’s family lore.
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In the artist’s first show in Germany, Maysha Mohamedi continues her exploration of fundamental relationships between colour and shape, language, matter, and being.
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