Festival Travelling, 11 février 2020 - 12:00 – 18 février 2020 - 18:00 /
Dans le cadre du Festival Travelling 2020, le Frac Bretagne vous propose de découvrir une sélection de films.
PROGRAMME DES PROJECTIONS
Du mardi 11 au mardi 18 février 2020
Diffusion en continu de 12h à 19h
Hobby à tout prix !
Un ensemble de films d’artistes qui parlent de la vie quotidienne à Beyrouth et au Liban. Promenade de bord de mer, baignade, musique et musculation, des hobbies à tout prix, des résistances de la vie qu’on ne peut contenir.
Diffusion en continu les samedi 15 et dimanche 16 février 2020 de 12h à 19h.
Durée : 40 minutes.
Auditorium du Frac.
Entrée libre et gratuite.
Walid Raad, I only Wish That I Could Weep (2001), Collection Frac Occitanie Montpellier, 7’36
Mounira Al Solh , Paris Without a Sea (2007-2008), 13’07
Sirine Fattouh, Love Talk Part I (2009), 3’40
Ziad Antar, Safe Sound (2006), Collection Frac Alsace, 9’10
Ziad Antar, Night of Love 2 (Guitare Charbel Haber) (2013), Collection Frac Alsace, 1’30
Sirine Fattouh, Love Talk Part II (2009), 4’40
Fonction critique 2, Aperto Lieu d'Art Contemporain, Montpellier, France. /
Fonction critique 2
[ Une proposition de Manuel Fadat ]
avec l’aimable participation de
Sandra & Gaspard Bébié-Valérian - Mohamed Bourouissa - John Cornu - Alain Declercq - mounir fatmi - Sirine Fattouh & Stéphanie Dadour -
Kendell Geers - Raphaël Grisey, Kàddu Yaraax, Bouba Touré - Khalil Joreige & Joana Hadjithomas - William Kentridge - Florence Lazar - Jean-Luc Moulène - Benjamin Sabatier - Artur Żmijewski.
Vernissage vendredi 17 janvier à 18h 30
Exposition du 18 janvier au 7 février 2020
Ouverture du mardi au dimanche de 14h à 18h
Cette exposition est le fruit d’un désir commun d’Aperto et de Manuel Fadat de présenter des artistes qui questionnent le monde, la réalité humaine, sociale, politique, économique.
Fonction Critique 2 fait écho, à dix ans d’intervalle, à une première exposition qui réunissait les œuvres de 18 artistes autour de la question des dimensions sociales et politiques dans l’art contemporain. « Critique et esthétique n’ont rien d’antinomique, bien au contraire, et c’est ce que semblent réaffirmer les œuvres présentées ».
Nous remercions tous les artistes qui ont généreusement accepté cette nouvelle invitation.
Beirut Art Fair 2019 /
Contested landscapes, emergent archives: Orient-Institut Beirut, 29th of August till the 13th of September. /
Contested landscapes, emergent archives
Liliana Gómez (University of Zurich)
in collaboration with Iris Fraueneder (University of Zurich)
The exhibition relates to the archive as a creative force and to emergent material archives as depositories to unfold ambivalences, contradictions, and the incommensurability of cultural work and the memory of landscape. It aims to discuss the long lasting degradation of landscapes contesting the often invisibilized environmental and political violence.
Opening event "In the Middle of a Leap Into the Void " by Sirine Fattouh - Letitia Gallery Beirut /
In the Middle of a Leap into the Void, Letitia Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon /
Letitia Gallery is pleased to present Sirine Fattouh’s first solo show in the gallery, entitled In the Middle of a Leap into the Void. The show curated by Mayssa Fattouh includes new commissions, light and sound installations, video, sculptures, photography and drawings, around the artist’srelationship with dreams and in between states of the conscious and subconscious.
Through a series of drawings, a medium the artist is exploring for the first time, Fattouh illustrates child-like colorful characters, mostly as androgynous self-portraits, rendering snapshots of her vivid night dreams. The curious scenes led her to associations with artists that have been at the forefront of the conceptual art movement such as Duchamp and Manzoni, which she depicts in humorous homages. “Drawing helped me get over much of my anxiety with the city of Beirut andrecurrent migration movements with my family during the civil war. I never showed thesedrawings and I was very happy that they played an important role in this show” says the artist. The interpretation of dreams is as ancient as first civilizations, with traces from the Babylonians with the Epic of Gilgamesh and The Book of Dreams, still preoccupying science, religion,psychology, philosophy and art. “Seeing Sirine at work on her drawings made me understand that it is the key that ties together the body of her recent work and led us to develop more work in thedirection of a more intimate and personal exhibition” explains the curator.
Across the gallery space are meticulously crafted variations of silver heads, small enough to fit inone’s hand palm, showing an abstracted face, a node to Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. Fattouh’sSleepers are void of eyes and ears but with a bulging nose and openings for the nostrils and mouth,as a living breathing organism, appearing as peaceful fragile silver spheres containing well guarded secrets.
Facing them Beirut Mutations (2015), a photomontage from assembled film photographs the artist took around her neighborhood, is leaning on a wall. The dominant phantasmagorical black and white image shows an advancing chaotic cityscape consuming itself and its inhabitants with it.Fattouh’s representation of the city stems from a place of ambivalence; having lived her childhoodduring the civil war between Beirut and France and completing her university studies in Paris, the artist returns to the city of her birth, a city that constantly oscillates in contradictions, between softness and violence, euphoria and deep crisis.
A cobalt blue light reverberating from a neon installation with the words Affect/Infect and sounds of a single drum fill the room in an airy presence building an intangible tension floating around. The viewer is probed to relinquish to inner intuition and examining notions of conciliation vs resistance to introspection. The drumming leads us to the end the space behind the landscape,Another Night in Beirut, a video iteration of her previous A Night in Beirut (2006) where the artist filmed a man in a white robe (El Tabbal) walking solitarily in the night. She manages to see him for the first time after years of hearing the sound of his drum interrupting her sleep during her childhood. This new video showing the same but now aged (Tabbal), this time riding a car, acts as a reminder of the acceleration of time and a mediator between the real and fictional spaces we juggle between within the constructed objects of our fantasy.
Throughout this multidisciplinary exhibition Sirine Fattouh invites visitors to drift together with the artist, in the middle of a leap into the void, as a decisive motive to challenge everyday conformism.
What can a Dot Become?, Akinci Gallery, Amsterdam: 3 May 2019 - 13 July 2019 /
Sirine Fattouh, The Sleepers, 2017, seven silver casts of hand-sculpted heads, around 10 x 15cm each.
AKINCI is proud to announce the exhibition What Can A Dot Become?, curated by Stéphanie Saadé. The exhibition will be festively opened on Friday 3 May with a.o. a culinary artwork by Lei Saito.
The exhibition centres around the primary sign of the dot. Modest, but certainly decisive, it is what connects the artworks of the 6 artists gathered for this occasion in the space of AKINCI: Charbel-joseph H.Boutros, Ismaïl Bahri, Sirine Fattouh, Stéphanie Saadé, Lei Saito and Vincent Verhoef.
The dot is present in all of the shown works, in a direct or indirect way, intentionally or not. Of different sizes and shapes, sometimes with no visible shape at all, it is, more than a pattern, a structuring element declined into a constellation of endless potentialities.
What can a dot become? The validity of the dot is questioned in the title of the show: isn’t it too little or too unimportant to become anything at all? In the show it becomes a hole, a ball, a figure, a seed, a star… These dots of different natures oscillate between the tiny and the immense, the earthly and the cosmic, the political and the poetical. We are lead to explore these multiple dimensions.
Seven of Sirine Fattouh’s (Lebanon, 1980) Sleepers (2017-2019) are scattered in the gallery; Formless at first sight, the small pebble-like figurines are actually representations of sleepers, realised during insomnia nights. While the artist was unable to sleep, she shaped the sleeping figures, giving them the relaxed and peaceful features of the one who is hugged by Morpheus’ arms. Fitted to the palm of the hand, the pretty silver figures appear like magical talismans that one could carry to conjure the impossibility of sleeping. Cast in brass and coated in silver, they become mirrors in which the artist’s sleepless face first reflects, merging symbolically with that of the sleepers. The visitor is also allowed to manipulate them, finding her/his own face mirrored on the uneven shiny round surfaces; they offer another image of oneself, as can happen in dreams, in Morpheus’ mirror.
Further on, another work, this time by Charbel-joseph H.Boutros (Lebanon, 1980), evokes sleep and unconsciousness. The subject characterises largely the artist’s practice, and his work Night Cartography (2011-2019) is at the start of several other series all aiming at materializing sleep. Here, sleep takes the shape of a black hole – we can remember the first photo ever taken of a black hole, recently released in the press – laying a dark veil onto the paper. The circular stain sucks us into a moment of absence of the artist: the actual work is based on the utmost moment of inactivity, that of sleep and unconsciousness, the opposite of how the working process is usually imagined. The artist seems to apply the rational method of mapping to this irrational moment, in which rules can be changed, roles inversed and laws, such as the one of gravity, ignored. Essentially, the artist defines his artistic and political posture as that of a sleeper.
Vincent Verhoef’s (The Netherlands, 1982) paintings also transport us elsewhere, propelling us to faraway time-spaces rather than inside ourselves. The artist represents historical events of great importance in the most abstract way: dots on a background. These dots actually correspond to the precise position of the “sun, moon and other celestial bodies” on the particular day when the events took place. Events that changed the face of the earth such as “the 4th of September 476, the day when the last Western roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, abdicated”, “the 14th of July 1789, the day of the storming of the Bastille”, or more recently September 11. Did the stars stay impassive on these days, following their usual trajectory, or is it not their specific alignment which determined the course of the events? The painted cosmic portraits seem to want to establish a connection between the two, bringing us back to notions of chance, fate and destiny. Here, fortune is told in the past tense, in a forensic approach sounding the stars. The use of contemporary technologies and software to determine their position contrasts with the purposefully naive aspect of the paintings; the work of a human being trying to paint the sky.
Also drawing a portrait of the sky, Lei Saito (Japan, 1980) imagines in Un morceau du ciel tomba et continua à rouler jusqu’à sa disparition, il devint l’horizon (2011) a tale of origins, where a piece of the sky would have fallen down and rolled, becoming the horizon. We see a constructed environment in which a black ball keeps getting smaller and smaller. A “corrupted perspective” in the words of the artist, who playfully disturbs our perception of space and reality. Is it the same balls which are at our feet in Points de Fuite (2018)? We could literally imagine sending them back up if it wasn’t for their weight, fragility and preciousness. The colours of the spherical paintings lead us to conceive the moment when the sky lost a piece of itself: at a magic hour such as dawn or dusk or simply at a random moment of the day or night? And the place where it happened: which parts of the world have such skies?
In Stéphanie Saadé’s (Lebanon, 1983) Contemplating an Old Memory (2017), the dot takes the shape of a seed. One is fixed in gold and therefore in time while the other is expected to grow during the exhibition: on the opening day water is poured on the natural seed, potentially pulling it out of dormancy and into life. The chosen seed is a lentil, an important nutritional element, the growth of which will document the passing of the exhibition. This particular seed also has the elementary shape of the circle, a perfect natural dot. Another story of birth and growth is told with Aller à l’École (2018): a tiny blouse on which is embroidered a path. This path is the first one that the artist took to go to school, embroidered on a blouse worn by her prior to going to school. The concept of destiny surfaces back in a different way: instead of considering historical events, we are invited to look at an individual’s micro-history.
Finally, in Ismaïl Bahri’s (Tunisia, 1978) film Revers (2016-17), a star’s portrait of another kind is put to the test: that of a person incarnating beauty and youth. Printed on a glossy magazine page, the page is crimpled again and again until the disappearance of the image on it. Every time, after crimpling the page into a ball, the artist opens it up again, giving us to see the transformations of the star’s face. The wrinkles of the paper become wrinkles on her face. At some point, the image’s materiality is transferred onto the artist’s hands, which become covered in residues of ink and paper, while the magazine page becomes completely white, blank and matt. A possible invitation to start anew… The apparatus fabricating dreams and illusion is destroyed. The work addresses through a soon obsolete support, paper, the surge of images which we are daily confronted with, and fuel.
