Following a first edition of BLIND DATE in our Beirut space in 2017 we are bringing the concept back with a group exhibition including artists from outside our gallery roster. Unknown to us and to each other, the 5 invited artists for this second edition are coincidentally all young female artists. With widely different practices and modes of expressions, they all have ties to the Arab-speaking world, and address each in her own way questions and subject matters linked to their roots and cultural heritage.
Alia Farid (*1985 in Kuwait City, Kuwait, lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico) is a filmmaker and sculptor whose practice centers on lesser-known histories that are often deliberately erased. Her film Chibayish (2023) is recorded at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and follows young marshland residents caring for a water buffalo, in a marsh engulfed by oil infrastructure and industrial waste. Chibayish is part of a larger group of works that Farid has developed since 2018, and that focuses on the impact of extractive industries on the ecological and social fabric of southern Iraq and Kuwait. Similarly tackling themes of cultural identity, history, colonialism, and the right to remain, Farid’s tapestries look at the under-told histories of Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the intersectional Palestinian–Puerto Rican solidarity movement. The stitchings on woolen blankets are embroidered by women in Southern Iraq using traditional crafts techniques, in a colorful pallet. Ignoring central perspective and using almost-naïve imagery they illustrate immigration stories documented through family archives, urban history, photographs, and other memorabilia found by the artist.
Daniele Genadry (*1980 in Baltimore, USA, lives and works in Paris, France and Beirut, Lebanon) works with painting, photography and print, to examine how light is captured and perceived. Her overexposed landscapes are painted in very precise, thin, brushstrokes, using a pointilliste technique in pastel and neon colors with pinks, purples, and blues. The paintings seem to capture sceneries in the quiet dawn or night hours, confronting architectural elements in ghostly white with a silent nature. The artificiality of the images, captured first in photograph, is consciously repainted with a very flat application of the color on the canvas. The painted reinterpretations of the original photos almost show the pixels of prints, but rather than capturing light, the works seem to produce it, inviting the viewer to step into deep, glowing, monochromic atmospheres.
Tala Worrell (*1991 in New York, USA, lives and works in Los Angeles, USA) is a Lebanese-American painter who grew up in Abu Dhabi. Through her abstract, gestural, paintings she negotiates the relationships between various parts of herself: “East and West, religious and secular, familial and individual, and psychological and somatic”. Worrell uses the intensity of daily life and the impact of noise and imagery around her to produce non-figurative paintings: her work is all about shapes and colors that reinterpret feelings provoked by ordinary encounters. Using anything she can lay her hands on, she paints fields of colors juxtaposing intense hues with chia seeds, flour, lace, or any other material that allows her to express her inner feelings.
Bayan Kiwan (*1995 in Amman, Jordan, lives and works in New York, USA) is a Palestinian-Jordanian artist whose research and practice are driven by questions of place, memory, and the everyday as an inscrutable site of resistance. An extension of this, her paintings are explorations of women’s private sociality and intimacy. As such, her figurative works tell stories from her peer-group, stories of friendly gatherings, of interiors, of togetherness in a contemporary Genre painting style. Her experimentation with perspective leads her to represent female bodies in what might look like strange angles on large- scale canvases. In contrast, her Necks are a series of small expressive paintings which she produces daily. While they sprang from a reflection on both extreme dangers and desire, they highlight the fragility of that crucial link between head and body.
Farah Al Qasimi (*1991 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, lives and works in New York, USA) engages with postcolonial structures of power, gender, and the prevailing aesthetics of the Gulf States in her multimedia work. Her photographs, films, and performances effortlessly tell stories between documentation and fiction, metaphor and banality, with lightness and humor. The installation in the show presents a wallpaper with a film and photographs that draw on the 1975 Japanese film version of The Little Mermaid based on Hans Christian Anderson’s original story. While they might come across as joyful pop imagery at first sight, the works tackle darker themes, questioning global trade, consumerism, desire, and endangered environments. Superposing contrasting societies and cultures, they capture daily life through the prism of multiple interconnected crises, whether isolation, lockdowns, desertification, desalination or water supplies.
Press release from Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut
Image: Alia Farid. Installation view BLIND DATE 2.0. 2024. Sfeir-Semler Karantina, Beirut, Lebanon. Image courtesy of the artists and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg
