EXHIBITIONS
Saleh Barakat Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Katya Traboulsi titled Perpetual Identities.
The show puts on display 46 hand-crafted replicas of Lebanese war bombshells adorned with colorful patterns, beads and sculpted forms. Each of these bombshells take on a different iconography which is associated with a national identity. The interplay between the form of the bombshell and the iconographic content posits a tension between war and culture. The transformation of destructive military objects into beautiful ornate vessels proposes that culture will ultimately survive in these dark times. The opening night of the exhibition will coincide with the launch of a book on the project. A book signing will be held at 8pm.
Katya Traboulsi (b.1960) is a Beirut-based multimedia artist. Traboulsi lived and worked in Dubai from 1989 till 2016 before returning to her native Beirut. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 1986 in Paris, London, Dubai, Kuwait, North America, the Algerian museum of Modern Art and the International Armory Show in New York. In 2013, Traboulsi published a book titled Generation War, which presented a body of work that traced the story of photojournalists who had witnessed the civil war during the 1980s. It was conceived by the artist as an homage to their efforts, and a political project that sought to record the country’s complex histories.
“The Twilight turns from amethyst
To deep and deeper blue,
The lamp fills with a pale green glow
The trees of the avenue.
The old piano plays an air,
Sedate and slow and gay;
She bends upon the yellow keys,
Her head inclines this way.
Shy thoughts and grave wide eyes and hands
That wander as they list –
The twilight turns to darker blue
– Poem II, from Chamber Music, James Joyce (1907)
In her latest collection of paintings, Nadia Safieddine diversifies the subject matter of her work by shifting the focus from lugubrious, distorted, and barely-visible figures to something – a landscape? – more definitely abstract. She takes as her starting point a classical reference:
Rembrandt’s painting A Woman Bathing in a Stream. Half of the works on display fall within the category of the nude and the portrait, but her latest move toward the non-pictorial intimates that her three categories of painting are not as separate as in the classical distinction of genres. Painted with a technique of impasto, all of Safieddine’s work is enmeshed in the dialectical relationship between abstract expressionism and figuration.