Toys and Trophies: From Zeus’ Pandora to Barbie Doll was the solo exhibition of Lebanese artist, Tagreed Darghouth, presented at Tabari Artspace gallery in Dubai.
The selected works aimed to probe the socially constructed reality of feminine beauty and its relation to the male gaze in contemporary, neoliberal society. Working with acrylic on canvas, the artist continued her unabashed social commentary, reflecting upon what she encountered on the streets of Beirut and beyond in the cybersphere where international mass media and social media platforms continued to shape and reinforce limiting and dominant visions of gender. Darghouth, who regularly connected far-flung influences from literature, philosophy, and music to her personal experiences in the modern world, now turned to Greek mythology as her point of departure. Pandora was the fabled first woman to be constructed in ancient Greek society and unleashed with unrivaled physical beauty and immense sexual allure.
The artist probed the fabricated nature and superficiality of Pandora, a woman over whom Aphrodite 'spilled grace' and whose destiny was to become "an evil men would love to embrace." Conflating the classical with the contemporary throughout this body of work, Pandora, Darghouth reasoned, was a myth but so too was the Barbie doll. Barbie's plastic physique had become a modern icon associated with pre-packaged western gender expectations and superficiality. The selected works saw Dargouth’s paintbrush activate and amplify the constructed nature of human fictions and the fetishized status of femininity. Skulls, which had featured regularly in the artist's output since 2010, were included here, referring back to her preoccupation with the notion of 'Memento mori' and felt all the more poignant now given the backdrop and context of this exhibition. Dargouth also interrogated the frail and fair frame of the Barbie doll, the unquestioned and iconized beauty of Venus and Aphrodite, glossed lips, the human torso, and mannequin dummies which existed to be draped. Through prominent, layered brushstrokes and swift flicks of the wrist, the artist engaged in her own form of seduction as she pushed the viewer to consider her subjects anew.
