BAC | Exhibitions Opening | Next Week June 9

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Exhibition Opening | Gallery 1
Shuruq Harb
Ghost at the Feast

Opening Wednesday June 9, 2021
until September 10, 2021
from 11AM to 8PM, booking required

Ghost at the Feast brings together five major works conceived by #shuruqharb over the past ten years. In her practice, Harb looks peripherally at the dispossession and oppression faced by Palestinians, tracking the kinds of dreams, hallucinations, psychological symptoms and impulses their brutality and fragmentation creates. Harb's vastly interdisciplinary work emerges from a restless effort to create a portrait of her native Ramallah through its ephemeral inventories of ever-changing street signage, and popular imagery circulating between city facades, shop windows and virtual clouds. Faces and names of strangers, signifiers of another time and else place, other peoples' stories and souvenirs... all have become her way of claiming her own memory and politics of location. 

In continuous correspondence and conversation with the #beirutartcenter team, Harb has proposed new and existing iterations of her works, two of which were produced in Lebanon for the show. Together we have conceived an exhibition filtered through layers of estrangement and familiarity. Exploring how the visual indexes of one place could resonate in another where neither she nor her works can travel, what emerges is an uncannily common terrain that links our two cities and their respective struggles: a profound sense of loss and a culture that comes out of and resists duress.

Among other things, the exhibition poses the question of how works made from and for Palestine can take on the ability to conjure the dead in Lebanon.

Shuruq Harb is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Her artistic practice focuses on online visual culture and traces subversive routes for the circulation of images and goods. 

Exhibition Opening | Gallery 2
Shakeeb Abu Hamdan
Flattened to a Papery Thinness

Opening Wednesday June 9, 2021
until September 10, 2021
from 11AM to 8PM, booking required
Reserve your time slot here

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan's solo show in BAC's Gallery 2 is something of a botched crime scene, a literal paper trail.

Through relentless iterations –including discrete drawings, large historical friezes, disorienting spatial experiments, and cryptic dioramas— Shakeeb  has been broadening his eclectic library of found, manipulated comic references, decontextualized educational drawings, as well as his own drawings and scribbles.  

Throughout, he has honed in on a visual repertoire that not only advances narrative in unexpected ways but also, becomes a structural device that stands in for the act of reading itself. Thus a gap between a character's teeth becomes an ellipsis, a sandwich becomes a narrative hinge, a window doubles as a vignette, a pothole as a time portal and so on. What is developed through this is a real theory of history. Playing with linear comic structures, line textures, scale and perspective, Shakeeb's work presents a wry take on disaster as contingency, and the profound unease of history as farce.
Shakeeb Abu Hamdan's exhibition will be in conjunction with the launch of his new book published with Samandal in English and Arabic. While the book draws narrative threads that take the reader through historical factoids from the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand, to the hallucinations of Sirhan Sirhan recounting voices in his head urging him to shoot Robert Kennedy; the installation is meant to function more like a proposition about the legibility of space. 

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan is an artist, musician and recording/sound engineer living in #beirut, Lebanon. His visual practice consists of systems of drawings, found illustrations and texts, and often examines the construction of historical narrative. His work exists in a space somewhere between #contemporaryart and experimental comics and takes the form of publications, print works and installations. 

Further information in the press release to download