January 16.09 - April 2.09
Opening reception: Thursday January 15, from 6pm to 9pm
Jananne Al-Ani A Loving Man. Tony Chakar 4 Cotton Underwear for Tony. Antoine D'Agata Self Portraits 1991-2008. Mona Hatoum So Much I Want to Say. Emily Jacir Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work). Jill Magid Composite. Anri Sala Intervista. Lina Saneh Body pArts. Lisa Steele Birthday Suit - with scars and defects. Akram Zaatari Saida, June 6, 1982. Cynthia Zaven Missing Links. |
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  About the exhibition |
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How does one define "the intimate"?
When is a story worthy of becoming public?
What marks the border between a personal experience and an artistic one?
Beirut Art Center’s opening exhibition Closer, features art works drawn from personal and intimate stories, which create a space to reflect on experiences both common and unique, familiar and without precedent, public and intensely private.
All of the works included in this exhibition have in common a defined starting point from which narratives can take on various lives of their own. In initiating a process—whether it is switching
on a camera before a relative without knowing where it may lead, or recording the passage of time through self-portraits taken over years—these art works create a field in which actions, ideas, and emotions can materialize unexpectedly, and even, accidentally.
Often, these works shake our notions of reality by fictionalizing intimate stories and/or situating
the artist as the subject/object of the work itself.
The exhibition is loosely built around three strands:
Works in which artists create narratives around the presence of one or a few close members of
their families.
Works in which artists take a personal story in order to reflect on our collective histories and their multiple narratives.
And finally, works in which artists represent themselves at the center of the piece, raising
questions as to the relations between one’s self image and one’s public image. |
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| Views click on thumbnail to enlarge photos |
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| Biography |
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JANANNE AL-ANI
Jananne Al-Ani was born in Iraq in 1966. She lives and works in London. Al-Ani studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 1997. She is currently AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the London College of Communication developing a new body of work, The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land Without People.
Exhibiting widely in Britain and abroad, Al-Ani has had solo shows at Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2005) and the Norwich Gallery (2004). Recent group exhibitions include The Screen-Eye or the New Image: 100 videos to rethink the world, Casino Luxembourg (2007); Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, MoMA, New York; Around the World in Eighty Days, ICA, London and Why Pictures Now: Film, Photography, Video at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna (2006).
Al-Ani has co-curated exhibitions including Veil at The New Art Gallery Walsall touring to the Bluecoat Arts Centre and Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Modern Art Oxford and Kulturhuset Stockholm (2003/4). Recipient of the East International Award (2000), her works can be found in public collections including the Tate Gallery and Imperial War Museum, London; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC and Darat al Funun, Amman.
TONY CHAKAR
Tony Chakar is an architect and writer, born in Beirut in 1968. his works include: A Retroactive Monument for a Chimerical City: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (1999); All That is Solid Melts Into Air: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2000); Four Cotton Underwear for Tony: Ashkal Alwan, TownHouse Gallery, Cairo, also shown in many European cities as part of Contemporary Arab Representations, a project curated by Catherine David (2001-02); Rouwaysset, a Modern Vernacular (With Naji Assi): Contemporary Arab Representations, the Sharjah Biennial and Sao Paolo, S.A.(2001-03); Beirut, the Impossible Portrait: The Venice Biennial (2003); The Eyeless Map: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2003); My Neck is Thinner than a Hair (2004), a lecture/performance with Walid Raad and Bilal Khbeiz, shown in different locations around the world; A Window to the World (2005): Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Various Small Fires (2007): The Royal College of Art, London; Memorial to the Iraq War (2007): ICA, London;
Yesterday’s Man (2007): a play-performance with Rabih Mroué and Tiago Rodrigues showing in several European cities; The Eighth Day (2008): Lecture/performance shown in many European cities.
He also contributes to European art magazines, and teaches History of Art and History of Architecture at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux arts (ALBA).
ANTOINE D’AGATA
Born in Marseilles, Antoine d'Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.
During his time in New York , in 1991-92, D'Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005.
In 2004 D'Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World's Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo.
Since 2005 Antoine d'Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.
MONA HATOUM
Hatoum first became widely known in the mid 80s for a series of performance and video works that focused with great intensity on the body. In the '90s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations and sculpture. Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in 'Corps étranger' (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body.
Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952 and now lives and works in London and Berlin. She has participated in numerous important exhibitions including the Turner Prize (1995), The Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), The Istanbul Biennial (1995), Documenta XI (2002), the Biennale of Sydney (2006), the 3rd Auckland Triennial (2007) and the Quadrennial for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2008). Solo exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994), Tate Britain, London (2000) Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Magasin 3, Stockholm (2004) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005).
Mona Hatoum will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in the context of the next Venice Biennale (2009).
EMILY JACIR
Emily Jacir’s work spans a diverse range of media and strategies including film, photography, social interventions, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. Recurrent themes in her practice include repressed historical narratives, resistance, political land divisions, movement (both forced and voluntary) and the logic of the archive. Jacir has shown extensively throughout Europe, the Americas and the Middle East since 1994.
Awards in 2007 include a Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale for her work “Material for a film” and a Prince Claus Award from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague. In November 2008 she was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize and which granted her a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City opening in February of 2009.
In 2003, belongings was published by O.K Books, a monograph on a selection of Jacir’s work from 1998 – 2003. Her second monograph (2008) is published by Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg.
She conceived of and co-curated the first Palestine International Video Festival in Ramallah in 2002. Recently she curated a selection of shorts; Palestinian Revolution Cinema (1968 – 1982) which went on tour in 2007. She is currently a full-time professor at the International Academy of Art Palestine in Ramallah.
JILL MAGID
Jill Magid seeks intimate relations with impersonal structures. She is intrigued by hidden information, being public as a condition for existence, and intimacy in relation to power and observation. Magid works in a variety of media including literature, video, sculpture, photography, and performance. She received a MS in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include The Thicker the Glass at Yvon Lambert (Paris), Article 12 at Stroom (NL), With Full Consent at Gagosian Gallery (NYC), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Centre d’Art Santa Monica (Barcelona), Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies At Bard (NY), Artist Space (NYC), Storefront for Art and Architecture (NYC), De Appel (Amsterdam), The Rose Art Museum (Boston), MOCA Taipei, and at the Liverpool Biennial International ’04. She has written two novellas: Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2007), and One Cycle of Memory in the city of L (2004), and is currently working on her third.
Magid teaches at The Cooper Union in NYC.
ANRI SALA
Anri Sala was born in 1974, in Tirana, Albania. He lives and works in Paris.
With his films, video installations and photographs, Anri Sala explores the borders of history and geography, as seen through the eyes of marginal characters who become accidental actors in collective dramas. A mingling of personal stories and social surveys, Anri Sala’s works are existential explorations of intimate, interwoven narratives. Colored with sudden epiphanies and visions, the works reveal unexpected and overlooked fragments of reality. For his films, Anri Sala has used different techniques and formats, experimenting with cinematic and video techniques in order to capture the end of dreams and the fall of ideologies, while also trying to describe private histories and small tragedies.
Sala’s work has been shown internationally in institutions, Biennales, and galleries.
LINA SANEH
Lina Saneh was born in Beirut in 1966. She studied theater at the Lebanese University in Beirut and at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She has written, directed and acted in numerous plays among which: Les Chaises (1996), Ovrira (1997), Extrait d’Etat Civil (2000), Biokhraphia (2002), Appendice (2007), I Had A Dream, Mom (video, 2006), and Someone Must Have Been Telling Lies About Me (video installation, 2008).
Since 2000, Saneh is an assistant professor at the Institut d’Etudes Scéniques et Audio-visuelles (IESAV) at the Université Saint-Joseph (USJ) in Beirut and at the Université Saint-Esprit Kaslik.
She is currently teaching at the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design in Geneva (Switzerland).
AKRAM ZAATARI
Born in Saida, Lebanon, in 1966, Akram Zaatari is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. Zaatari has been exploring issues pertinent to postwar Lebanon. Collector of testimonies on Lebanon’s society, he focused on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars, the logic of religious and national resistance, and the production and circulation of images in the context of geographically divided Middle East. Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), Zaatari based his work on collecting, studying, and archiving the photographic history of the Middle East notably studying the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani (1928-), as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices.
His videos include: “In This House” (2005), “This Day” (2003), “All is well on the Border” (1997), "Crazy of you" (1997), and in "How I love you" (2001).
CYNTHIA ZAVEN
Born in 1970, Cynthia Zaven is a pianist and composer based in Beirut. She graduated with honors from the Higher National Conservatory of Music and studied theater at Saint Joseph University and Paris VIII University. Since 1993, her works have included collaborations with filmmakers and stage directors, ranging from live performances to compositions and sound designs for theater and dance.
Zaven has collaborated with the French artist Catherine Cattaruzza since 1996. Their most recent video installation "Karaoke" tackled concepts of nationalism, territory and borders through the Lebanese National Anthem. Commissioned by Pro-Helvetia, "Karaoke" was exhibited at the Schlachthaus Teater in Bern in 2002.. Zaven's latest solo works include "Camouflage Lounge" (2005, Wanchai Corner House, Hong Kong), the "Untuned Piano Concerto with Delhi Traffic Orchestra" (2006, Khoj, New Delhi) and Missing Links (2007, Santralistanbul, Istanbul).
Zaven has written soundtracks for documentaries, experimental films and features, which have been shown in festivals around the world, including IDFA, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Kassel Documentary film and Video Festival, Videobrasil, the Bern Kunstmuseum, the Institute of Contemporary Art and Oxford's Museum of Modern Art.
Zaven is currently a professor of piano at the Higher National Conservatory of Music in Beirut.
LISA STEELE
Lisa Steele, born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1947, and studied English Literature at the University of Missouri. She immigrated to Canada in 1968 and is now a Canadian citizen. Steele's videotapes have been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally including: the Venice Biennale (1980), the Kunsthalle (Basel), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), 49th Parallel Videoseries, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Long Beach Museum. Her videotapes are in many collections including: The National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Houston, Texas), Ingrid Oppenheim, Concordia University (Montreal), Newcastle Polytechnic (England), Paulo Cardazzo (Milan), the Canadian Embassy (Tokyo) and the Akademie der Kunst (Berlin). |
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