Azad Nanakeli @ XVA Gallery, Dubai - Highlighted Memory

Azad Nanakeli: Highlighted Memory
XVA Gallery, Dubai
Through January 9, 2018

XVA Gallery presents AZAD NANAKELI’s first solo exhibition in Dubai. The Iraqi artist shows works of a variety of mediums; painting, photography, video and installation.

An international artist and a citizen of the world, Azad Nanakeli has focused his visual pattern on a multi-layered artistic discourse, at the crossroads between an impressive variety of media – painting, photography, video, installation – and an equally powerful narrative, which gives all his work an almost spiritual touch of coherence and unity. Born in Erbil, today part of the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in Iraq, currently living in Florence, Italy, Azad illustrated his trans-national mix of identity in around a hundred of international exhibitions, culminating in three editions of the Venice Biennale: the Kurdish pavilion in 2009, the Iraqi pavilion in 2011 and the Iranian pavilion in 2015.

Highlighted Memory, his current exhibition in Dubai, is an invitation to an overview of Azad Nanakeli’s major topics of reflection and a highly representative illustration of his innovative technique based on the overlapping of narrative and mixed media layers. The exhibition proposes a new frame where the artist can freely develop his own timeless connections between personal and trans-individual experiences, between the past and the present, between memory and identity. In Azad Nanakeli’s view, art becomes a recording and a critical process, able to contribute to a comprehension of the social role and the meaning of the artistic practice, proposing a series of reflections on how much art can contribute to the configuration of the modern world representation; interrogating itself at the same time on how the artist can make a correlation between the political reality and the social dramas through their artistic representation. In every layer of pictorial, or sound, or video matter of his works, the artist turns himself into a sort of archaeologist, able to dig and unveil the ‘ghost’ and unexpected faces of the personal and collective experience: it is as if, together with the artist, the viewer would enter his artworks from the back-door of the memory and have access in this way to a privileged and magical storytelling.

Claudio Scorretti
Collector, Art Advisor

XVA GALLERY
Al Fahidi Historical Neighborhood, Bur Dubai
www.xvagallery.com

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