Middle Eastern Art Gallery

Exhibitions

Contemporary Heritage

Hazem Harb 29 March - 1 September 2020 Contemporary Heritage is mixed media, visual artist, Harb’s first solo at the gallery since 2015 and will bring together a fresh body of work the cuts across disciplines and continues to push the boundaries of the contemporary art framework. This new body of work sees the artist observe the notion of heritage as unfixed and fluid. Underscoring Palestinian academic, Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism whereby through the imposition of soft powers history is reshaped for various agendas, Harb observes that while transferred from generation-to-generation, heritage also collides with colonial discourses resulting in new meanings that subsume the stories of the original owners who are often forcibly absent. A consistent thread throughout Harb’s practice has been the preoccupation with the Palestinian people and their collective and subjective narratives which he investigates both in the literal sense - referring to archives and academic texts as the foundations of his work and in the sense of physical investigation through the deployment of his materials. The artist, in continual flow, oscillates between mediums, drawn to those which he maintains best convey the sentiments of each new concept. Harb has previously worked with film, photography, installation, collage and textile and now leans towards a fresh mode of representation that reconfigures the past. As well as a large-scale collage triptych in Harb’s now-ubiquitous contemporary collage format Contemporary Heritage will see the artist produce new works in relief form, transposing 1920s Palestinian archival imagery into etchings that come to form compelling contemporary artefacts much like those of the forgotten societies now resigned to museums. As the debate surrounding looted antiquities looms large in the west, Harb’s reliefs, presented as the findings of archaeologists, are at once preserving history but also highlighting the ease at which certain communities, absent from the rhetoric and its presentation, become reduced to a historical exhibit in a foreign land.

Exhibitions

Alfred Basbous: A Modern Adventure

Alfred Basbous Foundation 28 January - 5 March 2020 Alfred Basbous Solo Exhibition January 23, 2020 until March 1, 2020 Tabari Artspace is delighted to announce its first show of 2020, the solo exhibit of seminal Lebanese sculptor Alfred...

Exhibitions

Between Floating Worlds

Kevork Mourad 5 November 2019 - 22 January 2020 Constantly striving to spark alternative conversations around the socio-political reality of the Middle East and its dias-pora, Tabari Artspace is delighted to announce its first show of the new season - Between Floating Worlds - a solo exhibit of visual artist Kevork Mourad.

Exhibitions

Hussein Madi

Hussein Madi 23 November - 15 December 2011 Artspace Gallery is pleased to be showcasing an innovative selection of works by the Lebanese artist Hussein Madi that is taking place from the 23rd of November to the 15th of December 2011. Born in 1938 in Chebaa, Lebanon, he lived between Rome and Beirut from 1973-1986. In 1986 he decided to stay permanently in Beirut. His art has been viewed by thousands of people around the world at such venues as the British Museum, the Venice Biennale and Tokyo’s Ueno Museum. Madi’s joyful experiments in color and form have resulted in a unique body of work that relates to modern artists like Matisse and Picasso as well as to the principles of divine harmony that inform the abstract designs of Islamic art. Madi's work focuses on both figures and more abstract decorative works. Madi is known particularly for his delightful paintings of women, which are supposed to represent the daily life of ordinary women in Lebanese culture and society. These are of women both in the home and at leisure, whether relaxing on the beach, in their home clothes, or talking with their friends. His more abstract works are an extension of this as he paints leaves and natural vegetation as symbolism of life, beauty and happiness. Whether in two or three dimensions, Madi’s lines sing with a spontaneous freedom that belies the careful, even exacting, calculations that the artist invests in each work. The combination of meticulousness and sensuality is everywhere evident in Madi’s work, inspired by his profound belief in “God’s universal order, in which everything is different and yet composed of the same cosmic elements.”