Artspace London, a leading contemporary Middle Eastern art gallery will hold an exclusive exhibit entitled Deep Surfaces; which will feature the captivating works of artists Katya Traboulsi and Vivian van Blerk. Artspace London focuses on driving contemporary Middle Eastern art forward and providing artists with a link between the East and West while catering to its vast client base residing in the UK and throughout Europe. The renowned gallery has participated in several local and international art fairs and collaborated with numerous iconic art institutions and is one of the art world’s most prominent platforms for contemporary Middle Eastern art.

Deep Surfaces will showcase lenticular holographs by Katya Traboulsi and colour photographs by Vivian van Blerk. The concept of this exhibit is centered around photographs and how they record and grasp an instant in time. The multimedia techniques of Katya Traboulsi and Vivian van Blerk result in photographs which capture long expanses of time – time living, sculpting, cutting, painting, adding layers over days, weeks and months. Stacking multiple new layers packed with unexpected details on a surface is analogous to how our lives are enriched daily by added experiences. The artwork helps organise this tumult of life lived. The construction of these works accompany the artists as a physical trace of their beings as they, like all of us, live through perpetually changing conditions. It is a universal human need to create new forms, real things in the world, in order to record, slow-down and make some sense of the quickly passing time.

Katya Traboulsi is a Dubai based, contemporary Lebanese artist. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world. Katya’s art has found its way to several private collections in Canada, France, Switzerland, the United States, England, Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan and Lebanon. In her work, Katya moves freely with her brush telling a new story with every stroke. She draws inspiration from the environment and the region she lives in. Katya de-dramatizes reality by using bold colours and figures between the real and the unreal. She refers to her expressionist paintings as her “mind releaser” as it serves as a sort of therapy to release the fears related to the people and circumstances of life around her. In Deep Surfaces, she layers medical imagery with painting and drawing to create lenticular holograms which shift and change as they reveal themselves to the viewer. Out of Traboulsi's collected and organised experience of time and the world, the viewer creates a personally relevant interpretation as he moves in front of the hologram's multiple shimmering layers.

Vivian's works are particularly preoccupied with inventing narratives to unite his fragmented inheritance of history, art and literature. Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1971, Vivian van Blerk has lived and worked in Paris since 1997. His photographic work exploits the immediacy and apparent documentary truthfulness of photography to invent fictions which unfold within parallel worlds very close to our own. In this collection, he sculpts, models and paints dramatic sets over weeks or months, adding fresh experiences, ideas and emotions each new work-day. The accumulated experiences and details added daily transformthe artwork which reveals its many narratives to the viewer over time. Van Blerk uses photographic techniques of lighting, framing, montage and negative retouching to transform the sets he builds out of his life and imagination into coherent and independant fictional universes.

The works of Katya Traboulsi and Vivian van Blerk never cease to be photographs - graphic traces of light on surfaces. These exquisite smooth photographic surfaces are portals into the deep time of human experience. Their work creates a new dimension in which we can truly examine and experience the definition, importance and impact of time and its many layers, as within time we find memories, emotions and new opportunities.