Rana Elnemr: the dictionary of imaginary places

Egyptian artist Rana Elnemr to speak with curator Marie Muracciole about her exhibition a chapter of synonyms currently showing at Beirut Art Center. Her first solo in Beirut, the exhibition revolves around architecture, image-making, and imagination. The talk takes its title from one of the works in the exhibition, which in turn is inspired by the title of Alberto Manguel’s and Gianni Guadalupe’s book originally published in 1980. The work, a photograph of this book standing on a shelf, on the one hand, expands the intimate physical space of the home to which this shelf supposedly belongs, towards the hidden, transformed, or imagined spaces of fictitious geography and territories; on the other hand, it alludes to the fictions, myths, and imaginaries that construct once and again the physical and subjective experiences of space.

This work opens the site for a conversation about Rana Elnemr’s work in general and throughout the exhibition, emerging from her observations of contemporary city forms, the time-boundedness of the photographic medium, as well as the practical and abstract processes of creating space.