EXHIBITIONS
Oussama Baalbaki is an artist who is situated fully within his paintings, providing an intimacy with his world that we can somehow believe. In a world saturated with images, with the knowledge of the unreal that can be easily contained within that image, we find a place here that perhaps we can also believe.
Light is a way around these paintings, whether in the glow of the sun, the play of the evening pink on the side of a building, or felt within the close building up of dark and light brushstrokes slowly illuminating the side of a face, the turn of a hand. From the perspective of light, the subjects are perhaps less significant than the movement of that light that passes across and through them. And yet, the subject does make a difference. expression of the feeling of contact, intimacy, desire.
The landscape of the face becomes the landscape of his view. The internal world becomes external while remaining within.
The white world of Nicole Bouldoukian rests on the edge of what we see. Forms shift as the viewer also moves, and the shape of the world seems to tilt. This exhibition comprises eighteen sculptures in white formed from papier-mâché and one rendered in bronze. They refer collectively to regeneration, a necessary stage in the renewal and restoration of life that is, for Bouldoukian, a critical part of her work.
Nicole Berjon Bouldoukian is an artist working in France and Lebanon. She has exhibited her work in both countries, including the Epreuve D'Artistes Gallery. A native of Lozère, France, she was first drawn to Lebanon in an exhibition while studying literature in Montpellier. She has remained in Lebanon for 50 years now, where she has become a mother and grandmother. Her work relies primarily on painting, drawing, and copper enamels, stoneware, bronze, and resin. Her practice takes up themes of fauna, La Fontaine Fables, human relations, and numerous others. Currently, she is interested in extinction and environmental deterioration.
Collective Quilting from Tripoli
11-20 July, 2024
Quilting is both a generative act and a practice of communal sustenance that encompasses material, sensorial, and emotional domains. Quilt designs often narrate dreams and memories or send messages, while storytelling and community building are inherent to the processes of making and using. During 2023 Sixty women associated with the Ruwwad association in Tripoli experimented with these layers of creative practice under the creative guidance of Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri, co-founders of Bokja Design. Stitching on the border of Syria Street, which has separated the communities of Jabal Mohsen and Bab el Tabbeneh since the 1970s, the group envisioned restorative and sustainable connectivity through the design and fabrication of highly textured wall hangings made from upcycled fabrics.
Quilting connects to a rich history of textile projects oriented toward social empowerment, engaged art practice, and memory work. Most of the Ruwwad quilters had learned the historically feminine practices of stitching, crocheting, and knitting in familial and vocational settings. As such, they were not exposed to the elite institutionalized realm of “high art” that many exhibitions of contemporary textiles are currently attempting to rupture. Agial Gallery approaches this project in support of artists’ social engagement toward their own societies. Moreover, the gallery upholds the value of quilting, a genre once categorized
diminutively in the Euroamerican art world as “outsider” or “folk” art. The women and their collaborating partners thus engage a slow disciplinary unraveling, showing how gender and socioeconomic class shape and are shaped by lingering hierarchies that distinguish art from craft, high from low, professional from amateur. In their suturing, the Ruwwad quilters sow into a rich terrain of collective quilting practices that seek to mend societal divisions. Their artistry evinces the restorative power of their work.