EXHIBITIONS
Organs of the Outlandish
The trouble with Vital, accessory, and auxiliary organs begins the moment they make themselves felt. Only through the disavowal of organs as internal or external objects can the masters of their prosthetics exploit them. No figure other than the prosthetic master encapsulates the unsteady compound of anxiety and hubris, loss and compensation, narcissistic wounds, and phallic fantasies. The trouble with the magnificence of the organ happens as it quickly turns awry once it founders or reveals its exteriority. Like the fetish, the organ-turned-intruder enslaves its subject.
Mahmoud Obaidi's Hidden Messages and Make War Not Love estrange the histories of exploitation and dispassion with the advent of colonial industrial capitalism. These works reveal inklings of primal scenes that are short-circuited. Human body parts drop in and out in favor of phallic organs, orifices, accessory organs, prostheses, tanks, weapons and machines.
Mahmoud Obaidi is an Iraqi-Canadian artist practicing in Beirut, Qatar and Canada. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the globe, including MoMA Ps1, British Museum and Mathaf amongst numerous others.
Nelsy Massoud’s sculpture titled Metamorphosis expands on the transformative aspect of the being. Existence is performative and metamorphic, entailing a constant assertion of the being through the mutability of the self. Similarly, “caterpillars turn into butterflies,” or when “materials take new forms,” the structural loofahs bare new life forms. Metamorphosis is showing at the Saleh Barakat Gallery upper floor.
Born and raised in Lebanon in 1957, Nelsy Massoud first moved to Ivory Coast for four years before residing in New York for 23 years, where she learned glass mosaic and became the assistant of a master mosaicist Val. After a few open house exhibitions in New York, Massoud moved to Montreal, where she opened a gallery and workshop of mosaic for students, before coming back to Beirut in 20005. For five years, she was a manager and curator at 392 Rmeil 393 gallery in Beirut. In her exploration of various media, such as sand, polythene or glass, Massoud found a particular interest in the intertwining of light and colors in loofahs.
The Passion of saving the “moment before” beauty remains free of defeat, an echo of what is left, a shortcut to Freedom. -Bernard Ghanem
Since childhood, Bernard Ghanem (Lebanon, b.1963) had a talent in transforming any raw material and scraps into objects of play which captured and engaged people around him. A student of life, he developed a talent nourished by his sensibility and natural ability to create art out of ordinary material.
He moved from designing day to day lighting, to his first creative work of light, his sculpture ”The Dancer” in 1992, followed by another work of art,” The Escape”, etc. He is also an associate artist of the Sursock Museum’s Salon d’Automne. He had three solo exhibitions, in 1996, 2001 and 2012 at ”Agial Art Gallery”, Beirut. In 2002 Bernard traveled to the United Kingdom where he held numerous exhibitions in Hutton in the Forest Historic House,Cumbria followed at Kingston Lacy House, Dorset. His sculpture ”Progress” became part of the permanent collection of Lady and Lord Hutton’s permanent art collection. He is also a member of the Cumbria Sculptors Association. He held his solo exhibition “Balance” at Fire & Iron Gallery in 2003 UK.
In May 2008, three of his sculptures were chosen to be part of the gallery’s permanent collection and to be part of Surrey Sculptural Trail held every year at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisely, Surrey, UK.In 2013 he held with 60 Artists the largest ever Exhibition of sculptures in Lebanon at MACAM « Modern And Contemporary Art Museum » six of his sculptures, one metre high, was dedicated to “MACAM” followed by a second donation “Prisoners”, six metres high, in 2014, and a third donation “Society”, six metres high, in 2018, to be preserved for future generations. Bernard lives and works in Lebanon.