GLIMPSES | CONTEMPORARY ARAB WOMEN ARTISTS
Artists: MARWA ADEL | MIREILLE MERHEJ | ZENA ASSI | SARA SHAMMA | HEND EL FALAFLY
With a collection of 15 works from very promising artists, who are making an invaluable contribution to the growth of the Middle East Art scene, artsawa is delighted to invite you to explore the different issues and realities that drive the process of contemporary art creation in the Arab World.
This selection is diverse, thought provoking, touching, and offers bold and palpable narratives. These works bring different approaches, statements and visions but most importantly they represent a window into the creative energy and talent of five young female artists.
Despite the current political and religious struggles of our region, not least of which is the continued harassment and suffering of the women and the threat to their future role in their respective societies, this selection is particularly relevant: it gives a voice to women, to artists, and acts as an antidote to the current situation, a rightful message of hope and courage, a homage to the region's rich and diversified creative expressions.
Marwa Adel's photographs speak about the struggles she has faced in her own life. They express her desire to break free from the restrictions imposed on women by society and to be the person that she is rather than what society forces her to be. Her work is deeply personal, but it tells a universal story. Marwa’s artworks combine carefully posed photographs of models with symbols of fragility such as leaves, flowers and torn paper. Her wedding dress and veil also appear in the pictures as a reminder of bittersweet memories. She also adds digital textures, light effects and pieces of her calligraphic paintings to create beautiful, incredible sensual and eloquent compositions. The black and white colors of her works highlight the conflict between the real self of these women and the person they pretend to be. The recurring appearance of her wedding dress symbolizes her marriage which was the turning point in her life, and the impulse to rethink deeply her intimate self, her feelings and the objectives of her life.
Hend El Falafl's pencil drawings on canvas are a mix of the strong realism of the Egyptian society to which she belongs with a very subtle and symbolic messaging. Hend explores through her intimate works the different emotions expressed by women, which find root in her daily life. She boldly uses the female form and body language to hint at the female condition. Her semantic use of facial expressions conveys a scene of meaningful silence. She uses hands, feet, clothes to reveal the repressive tensions endured by women in Egypt while simultaneously to offer a promise of hope.
Looking at the paintings of Mireille Merhej from a distance, one instantly recalls the works of Jacques de la Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains among many artists who have adopted the iconic style of de-collage or ripped street posters. When you get closer to Mireille‘s canvases however, you discover when scrutinizing their surface material that her images are in fact painstakingly painted in acrylic and are not simply collaged or de-collaged torn printed posters and pages of color magazines. This leads us to place her work into the realm of photo-realism and brings to mind - in particular - Malcolm Morley’s photo realistic paintings from the mid-1960s which were drawn from mundane post cards of ships. Mireille’s work is not actually based on found images of torn street posters but on small collages, which she makes out of carefully chosen torn bits and pieces of pages from color magazines and comics books. Accordingly, the statement of Mireille’s works is not merely about the final visual outcome but also about the process of making them; this process underlines the differences between the “apparently” accidental act of tearing strips of paper to create an original collage on the one hand and the act of carefully working out the blown up paintings on the other. The adjoined and juxtaposed images and texts in Mireille’s paintings take us on a journey across time and pop culture: they mirror and invite you to her fantasy world and to her thoughts and statements about current society.
More so than most artists based in the Middle East, Sara Shamma possessed an international reputation long before the work presented in this exhibition was made. However, because of the current situation in her native Syria, both tragic and dramatic as world now knows, the images shown here possess a special resonance, and possibly her most powerful work to date in what is unfolding a distinguished career. Underlying the images, which were made in two different phases those before and after her exile to her new home in Lebanon, there is a powerful and unmistakable feeling of anxiety – an emotion focused, one can read on the threat to her children, rather than herself. Though no over statement about this is made, one can read in the difference between the first works and those made after she moved to Lebanon, an allegory about the Syria's situation and deterioration. The more recent composition shows an even stronger emotional content.
Zena Assi's contemporary work on canvas draws inspiration from the relations and conflicts between the individual and his or her spatial environment, society and surroundings. Zena uses various supports and mediums to document and explore the cultural and social changes of her city, its crowds and country. Her work takes shape in installations, animations, sculptures, and mainly paintings on canvas.
We would like to resume the meaning of this collection as an invitation to a Journey into the contemporary Arab world through the lens of female artists.
In conclusion we would say that Marwa's works conveys a powerful message to all other Arab women to be in a state of awakening of self-preservation through the search of truth about themselves, that Hend’s works reveals an optimistic vision of her society and its future, thirdly Mireille's humorous observation of her real world is narrated through a comic fantasy world, and Sara with her extremely bold work talks about her strong emotions and our collective anxiety for the people, the children and the future of our region. Last but not least, Zena's is about her concerns towards the human condition and its metamorphosis, and potential return to a state of darkness.
CATALOG