Artist Akram Zaatari @ Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples - "Father and Son" Exhibition

Akram Zaatari: Father and Son

Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples

23 April - 13 July 2024

Thomas Dane Gallery presents Father and Son, a solo exhibition of Akram Zaatari. The exhibition is  Akram Zaatari’s third with the gallery and the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Italy.      

Akram Zaatari (b. 1966, Saida) has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual and institutional infrastructure of Beirut's contemporary art scene. He has produced more than fifty films and videos, a dozen books and countless installations of photographic material, all sharing an interest in writing histories and the search for records and objects, keeping track of their changing hands, the retrieval of narratives and missing links that have been hidden, misplaced, lost, found, buried or excavated. The act of digging itself has become emblematic of his practice while acting to restore connections lost over time, or due to war and displacement. Akram Zaatari has dedicated a large volume of his work to the research and study of photographic practices in the Arab world and has made uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice.

Rooted in this research practice, Akram Zaatari’s exhibition in Naples retraces the element of restitution in the artist’s work, expressed mainly through text, documents and photographs that revisit descriptions and recreate objects or ties that once existed but are now lost. The exhibition features works across many media from the last two decades, beginning with his two-hour-long video, Ain el Mir (2002), in which the artist looks for a buried letter that never reached its destination. It spans through to Akram Zaatari’s most recent body of work, Father and Son (2024), in which the sarcophagi of two Phoenician Kings (father and son), separated since antiquity, are reunited. The project is accompanied by a series of new works on paper that look at the Mediterranean as a locus of exchange, extraction and movement across millennia.

Amongst these works Archeology (2017), Photographic Currency (2019) and Venus of Beirut, (2022), and a new work, Ibrahim and the Cat, For Inji Efflatoun (2024), all engage in the process of recreating objects that have either vanished or were never produced. The brass relief Ibrahim and the Cat – made with artisans in Naples – gives new form to a forgotten photograph taken by the father of Egyptian artist Inji Efflatoun for the purpose of making a painting that was never produced.

Akram Zaatari’s idea of ‘giving life to things that do not exist in the present’ also applies to the recreation of a stone monolith used to seal King Tabnit’s tomb, which was completely destroyed when his sarcophagus was extracted in 1887.  All that Refuses to Vanish (2022) was made from drawings and notes left by Ottoman statesman and painter Osman Hamdi during his excavation of the Sidon Necropolis.

Akram Zaatari lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Recent exhibitions include: Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2019); The Script, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, England (2018); The Fold, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati OH (2018); Letter to a Refusing Pilot, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (2018); Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain (2017); travelling to: K21, Düsseldorf, Germany (2018); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2018); Double Take: Akram Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation, National Portrait Gallery, London, England (2017); This Day at Ten, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland (2016); Unfolding, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2015); Akram Zaatari: The End of Time, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014); Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013); Projects 100: Akram Zaatari, Museum of Modern Art, New York NY, (2013); This Day at Ten / Aujourd’hui à 10, Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France (2013); Tomorrow Everything Will be Alright, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge MA (2012); The Uneasy Subject, MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain (2011). 

Additionally, Akram Zaatari’s work has been part of Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE (2018); the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2011); The Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2014); the 55th and 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2013 and 2007); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); 27th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil (2006); the 6th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2006); and the 15th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2006). 

Akram Zaatari’s work is included in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, England; Tate Modern, London, England; MCA Chicago, Chicago IL; Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles CA and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN.

The Father and Son project is also the artist’s doctoral project in Arts at ENSAPC and the Cy University, France, under the direction of François Pernot, Alejandra Riera and Bénédicte Savoy.

THOMAS DANE GALLERY

Via Francesco Crispi 69, 80122 Naples

www.thomasdanegallery.com

Asaad Arabi @ Ayyam Gallery, Beirut

Asaad Arabi: A Collective Memory, 2007 to 2017
Ayyam Gallery, Beirut
Through 6 January 2018

ASAAD ARABI

City of the Crows, 2017

Acrylic on canvas, 195 x 130 cm

Courtesy the artist and Ayyam Gallery, Dubai & Beirut

Ayyam Gallery Beirut presents A Collective Memory: 2007 to 2017, a solo exhibition by painter, theorist, and critic ASAAD ARABI. The exhibition highlights Asaad Arabi’s seminal works from 2007-2017, including both figurative and abstract works, as well as a selection of his newest paintings.

Throughout his six-decade artistic career, Asaad Arabi has continuously attempted to reach an intuitive equilibrium between what is remembered and what is taken as its symbolic significance as a result of being forgotten. Each artwork moves between two points of attraction, expressionism – with all its sufferings, and abstraction. For both, the artist finds significance of lines and intense colour as they fall into what he describes as a musical rhythm, as he finds that shapes are created as a result of an audio-visual binary that is in perfect harmony with the duality of remembering and forgetting.

Remembering allows the artist to portray the realism of what he is painting, while the process of forgetting – and tapping into his subconscious, childhood memories, dreams, and hallucinations – paves the way into introducing minimalism and abstraction in his works.

In his paintings of the Old City of Damascus and of Sidon – two cities engrossed in magic and legends – Asaad Arabi works directly from his memory. Forgetting the ‘direct description’ of these places, the artist uses a two dimensional method of processing the topography of the old alleys like done in miniatures from Arabic manuscripts.

Between 2010 and 2011, Asaad Arabi listened to Oum Kalthoum every day while drawing and painting in an immersive ritual, which then compelled him to study every aspect of her performance and the musicians who played with her. While Nostalgia paid homage to a legend and the intense emotional response she inspired, Oum Kalthoum elevates Asaad Arabi’s studies to a major survey of this iconic cultural figure. The artist approaches this icon with colourist expressionism and rhythmic lines that seem to sway with the imagined sounds of her powerful voice. Portrayed in mid performance, Oum Kalthoum is backed by a small orchestra, as Asaad Arabi toys with positive and negative space with various tones and forms.

In some instances a chair appears where a musician seems to be missing, in other compositions this inanimate object is shown upside down. These off-kilter representations suggest a break in the mood of the painting while pointing to a profound use of symbolism in which the psychological spaces of these historical moments are punctured by unseen forces. With each dramatic gesture of the Egyptian singer, the painter suggests the equally climatic response of her audience. Although implied as a body that lies beyond the picture plane, her fans have a tangible presence. Asaad Arabi extracts the emotive buoyancy of her voice through the visual as he searches for the lost hours of a bygone era through nostalgia-ridden compositions.

In these works, Asaad Arabi immortalises Oum Kalthoum as a symbol of the Arab renaissance, an era characterised by religious and social tolerance, while simultaneously shedding light on what he believes to be a current cultural decline and a rise in fundamentalism.

Also highlighted in the exhibition are Asaad Arabi’s paintings of the nude form. Arabi questions an artist’s stance, and whether that stance can be neutral. Without ideologising his work, Arabi points out that a painting represents the consciousness of the artist and therefore should never be a false testimony of his beliefs.

In his abstract works, Asaad Arabi preserves a vibrant palette, harmonious compositions, and multi-angle method of execution. He draws inspiration from the urban and musical components of cities that impacted his formative years—Sidon in south Lebanon and his native Damascus. Paris, his base since 1975, is another endless source of inspiration for the artist, through its rich architectural and musical heritage. The subject matters peek through the titles of Assad Arabi’s works, which he creates after completing each painting with the aim to intimate a graspable narrative for the viewer.

ASAAD ARABI

Widely respected as an early innovator of contemporary painting in the Arab world and a prominent art theorist and critic, Asaad Arabi has continuously reinvented his painting style in an attempt to depict the rhythms, sensuality, and concealed narratives of urban environments, particularly in his native Syria. Arabi’s fascination with cities and the spaces that define them has included an extensive investigation of how inhabitants influence the formation of culture in such settings—a focus that has led to colourist approaches and abstracted forms in addition to early experiments with modernist figuration.

Asaad Arabi’s decades-long career dates back to the 1960s, when he trained with Guido La Regina, an Italian painter that encouraged a new school of abstraction among students at the University of Damascus. Emerging from this aesthetic shift, Arabi’s insistence on formal experimentation quickly secured his status as a leading painter in Syria. The artist’s later usage of geometric abstraction reverberated throughout the region as a renewed interest in Islamic art and aesthetics took hold in the 1980s. In recent years, Asaad Arabi has alternated between pure abstractions that are reliant on tonal variations as affective details to expressionist depictions in which figures appear to merge with their environments.

Born in 1941, Asaad Arabi graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Damascus before moving to Paris, France in 1975, where he received a diploma in painting from the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, and subsequently earned a PhD in Aesthetics from the Sorbonne University. Arabi has exhibited in the Middle East and North Africa for more than sixty years and has been featured in solo and group shows throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States, most recently at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (2017); Galerie Frederic Moisan, Paris, France (2017); Ayyam Gallery DIFC, Dubai (2015).

Asaad Arabi’s works are housed in public and private collections such as Institut du Monde Arabe; the Barcelona Contemporary Museum of Art; the National Museum, New Delhi; the National Museum of Korea, Seoul; Los Angeles County Museum; and Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah.

AYYAM GALLERY BEIRUT
Beirut Tower, Ground Floor, Zeitoune Street, Across from Beirut Marina
www.ayyamgallery.com