EXHIBITIONS
The Failure of Analogy
Text by Natasha Gasparian
Tagreed Dargouth puts on display series of carcasses, ears, skulls, olive trees, chopped barks, and instruments of violence such as drones, excavator buckets, and meat mincers. She engages with the art historical canon, with figures such as Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh, for specific linguistic devices. On the level of representation, she draws on the history of art for recognizable objects, such as the skull in a memento mori, which are blown up in scale, recur in a series, and hold an allegorical status. On a formal level, this repetition is evocative of the endless variation possible in a neo-expressionist idiom. Dargouth’s painting is of a two-fold nature: one on hand, she employs, as allegory, elements of a vanitas or memento mori painting such as carcasses and skulls to comment on the structural violence that is manifest in the expropriation of Palestinian land, the decimation of human populations and surveillance, and on the other, it is reflective of an engagement with gesture, technique, texture, and color.
Chaza Charafeddine’s practice is characterized by a mandate for social change. She brings what is invisible into the domain of visibility. For her latest project, Maidames, she invited 10 migrant workers to each be photographed as the woman of their fantasies. These women are legally employed under the “Kafala” system, a system of slavery that requires the worker to have a sponsor in their country of employment who is responsible for their legal status and who controls their mobility. Taking on the linguistic codes of notable women, they embodied historical figures of nobility, women depicted in Old Masters paintings, movie stars, and political icons. Charafeddine’s photographs reveal that it is in identifying with the hegemonic other that these women are recognized as human.
Chaza Charafeddine (b. 1964, Tyre) is an artist and writer. She studied "special education" at La Branche - Centre de Formation en Pédagogie Curative et Sociothérapie, Switzerland and "Eurhythmy Dance" at Eurythmie Schule Hamburg in Germany. Having explored the fields of education and dance for a period of 15 years, she turned to photography and writing. Her photographic work has been shown in numerous galleries and cultural spaces in Lebanon and abroad. She has written a novella, Flashback, and a collection of short stories, Haqibatun Bilkade Tura, both published by Dar Al-Saqi in Beirut in 2012 and 2015, respectively. In 2007, she returned to Beirut where she now lives and works. Chaza Charafeddine is represented by Agial Art Gallery/Saleh Barakat Gallery.