Portraits

Throughout history, artists have made their own features, as well as those of family and friends, their primary subject of portraiture, and these intimate renderings have, in turn aided our understanding of the great masters themselves. This tradition continues among artists working in portraiture today but with different approaches and using various mediums. ‘Portraits’ is a group exhibition in which works by seven leading contemporary artists are placed in a dialogue with each other. The ways in which artists continue to respond and examine portraiture, particularly in the utilisation of different materials to express socio-political and cultural situations.

Ziad Antar used photographic films expired in the 70’s to take portraits of people he met in Lebanon. A portrait of Hashem El Madani, owner of studio Scheherazade in Sidon from whom Ziad bought ten rolls of medium format, black and white, expired films from 1976 and a 1948 Kodak Reflex II. The second portrait is of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto when he visited Beirut. Despite the constraints of uncontrollable light and of old, expired film in many cases yielding a total loss of pigment the images is sometimes blackened but we still glimpse the portrait of Pistoletto and Madani.

Nicene Kossentini explores her family portraits photos through her photographic series “Boujmal”. Reprinted portraits of her mother, grandmother and great grandmothers, all of which are adapted from antiquated photographs found in family albums, are set upon a backdrop of a desiccated salt lake found in her natal city of Sfax, Tunisia. The artist creates the sense of limbo where both image and time are suspended and the line that delineates past and present is vacant. Invoked by the negative space of the deceased, Kossentini explores nascent experiences of loneliness and present notions of loss with both the imagery of her home-place and her family.

Ali Kazim creates multi-layered constructions using oil and water based pigments. Ali presents an auto-portrait and continues his exploration of the human body which is complex both in its physicality and as a thematic concerns. The body, which is a core to perform everyday functions it keeps doing its tasks even most of the times without our conscious knowledge, while it goes though various emotional and spiritual stresses.

Yesmine Ben khelil ’s Secret Society is a series of ten drawings; each of them represents a masked character. Half-man half-monster, a product of combining multiple images and themes sourced from modern-day media. Through these mutants characters the artist tries to evoke the news at its most enigmatic. In fact, these drawings echo the confusion, violence and absurdity that characterise the present; an epoch punctuated by an endless succession of events which themselves generate significances, images and comment. These information flows are fragmented perceptions of reality and drawing from these perceptions the artist seeks to present.

Teresa Aninat & Catalina Swinburn The substratum on which the work of A&S is built, prepared to operate on the unsteady boarder situated between cult and artistic practice, through the use of ritual (performance) and objectual arrangement. Nevertheless, these dispositions are subject to the legality of the script and they settle like correlated actions being carefully regulated. This privilege of the script - of the image of the script - initiates control of the image of power that will be one of the chief characteristics evident in the work of A&S, an aspect that will go on to consolidate the scene-script, guiding the ritual like the conducting thread of a representation of the fault, for the benefit of a disposition of incarnation. Keeping their appearance as liturgical complexes that mime the historical repertory of sacred narratives, as if the whole history of painting, that is to say, a certain painting of the renaissance, was not more than an illustration of that said textuality, with its inventory of announcements, compassion, holy shrouds. In Painful Times; the material references and gestures empty of their original charge can be translated to the critique of the art system. In this sense A&S reproduce the intensity of a true “conflict of the images”, like an erudite recourse in which the discourse that sustains their practice is elaborated without pause.

Pascal Hachem “contact sheet” appears to ruminate upon the politics of distraction inherent to contemporary consumerism – “we become without our senses, blind, without reaction, speechless… we have no say…” The latter is made up of 72 photographs of the artists set against the suburban sprawl of the hills above Beirut. The third photo depicts the artist with a surgical mask over his mouth and nose, as do the next five images. In the photos that follow, more surgical masks are added to his face, covering first his eyes then the entire front of his skull. At the end of the series, the region above the artist’s neck is no longer recognisable as a human head.

David Noonan Beginning each of his screen prints by making a collage, David Noonan brings together an eclectic array of found imagery – sourced from film stills, books, magazines, and archive photos – to create dramatic scenes that suggest surreal narratives. These collages are then photographed and turned into large-scale screen prints, a technique remarkable for its sumptuous finish that relates to both artistic authenticity and mass media. Printed in harsh contrast black and white, Noonan’s images encapsulate the romanticism of golden age cinema, and its associations to memory, fiction, and modern mythology. Piecing together plausible narratives from his readymade motifs, Noonan renders the intimacy of psychological space as indistinguishable from public cognisance. Using the qualities of photomontage to replicate the linear aspects of film, Noonan’s disparate imagery collates to convey a transient sense of time and space that is both theatrical and strangely insular. Through his process of screen printing, Noonan capitalises on the effects of transluscent layering and exaggerated lighting to replicate the flickering chimera of cinematic projection; an intangible illusion simulating the abstraction of dreams.

Ymen Berhouma She works essentially in acrylic as she experiments with collage - assembling and peeling-away effects in mixed media. Born in 1976 she spends several years in France and in Germany finally settling in Tunis where she exhibits regularly since 2006. She draws slightly unstable silhouettes drowned in collages of paper and painted newspapers, soaked and torn; a work of colorful introspection.