Selected from the Erol Tabanca Collection, the works on display share a sensibility towards optical, thermal, metamorphic, and affective phenomena surrounding sunlight and its atmospheric refractions, exploring aesthetic possibilities surrounding mimicry as a biological and cultural impulse.
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For The Met Fifth Avenue’s facade niches, Nairy Baghramian has created four abstract polychrome sculptures with components that seem to have washed up like flotsam and jetsam in the voids of their respective niches. The project is the artist’s first public installation in New York City and is the fourth in the series of contemporary commissions for The Met’s facade.
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Organized by Ashkal Alwan as part of the first chapter of “Home Works 9: A Forum on Cultural Practices,” this exhibition revisits forms of critical artmaking in Lebanon from the 1990s onward. The title is a reference to Ashkal Alwan’s inaugural project, at Sanayeh Garden, Beirut (1995). The exhibition draws on lived experiences and acts of writing a subjective history and prompts us to consider what it means to tend to Lebanon’s recent woes from the vantage point of everyday life. An accompanying film program will run bi-weekly starting in January 2024.
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Taghavi’s practice insists on positionality: where one stands determines what—and how—one sees. For the past several years, her work with talismans, calligraphy, and the Islamic occult has coalesced into a series of sculptures and paintings that strive to signify the unseen.
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For the first time in Switzerland, an exhibition is devoted to the Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla (1917–1985), pioneer of modern Egyptian art, who lived in Europe from the 1950s. He engaged intensively with Paul Klee and experimented with various techniques, with Arabic calligraphy forming a central starting point. As an artist of the Hurufiyya movement, which developed new artistic possibilities out of the Arabic alphabet, he invented his own ‘creative words’ by combining abstraction and human forms.
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Developing long-term collaborations with workers, contractors and decision-makers, the arist takes an interest in the otherwise invisible structures of planning, construction, demolition and maintenance that shape the cities of the United Arab Emirates and beyond. His works, playful and poetic, rely on what he calls “found processes” in which the artist inserts himself, observing how individuals navigate, experiment with and bypass these systems.
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Originally conceived for the French Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, this is an immersive installation comprising film, sculpture, photography and performance, that interweaves artist’s biography with activist films produced across France, Algeria and Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal moment in the history of avant-garde film production.
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Curated by Alireza Bayat, the exhibition pursues to provide a platform for “the Afghans” as subjects possessing political agency. The actively engaging subjects take part in a dialogue that must be mutual. Can the Afghans be heard? How to listen without falling into stereotypes or blatant simplifications? The exhibition aims to enable forms of communication that might stretch and challenge the boundaries of the dialogue itself, escaping beyond the textual, rational and Western mode of communication.
Works by Ali Rahimi, Elyas & Abdollah Jafari Alavi, Farila Neshat, Hangama Amiri, Mohsin Taasha, and Sher Ali Hosseini.
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The title opens up a moment of revitalization and renewal, introducing the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale as a nurturing entity, filled with life, while acknowledging the necessity of water for all forms of life that dwell and seek shelter on our planet. Unfolding as a combination of practices such as inhabiting, cultivating, harvesting, searching, and sharing, this Biennale presents works that engage with the human-nature continuum, examine the built environment, observe the state of our surrounding landscapes, recount histories, and encourage us to listen more closely.
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This is an exhibition about visiting and revisiting, about being physically present in the space, with the traces left by artists who have been there, or hints of those who will be there. Watch for updates, here and elsewhere.
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The first major international survey of work by Lala Rukh. The exhibition reflects on three decades of her drawing, printmaking, photography and video, produced against the backdrop of political turmoil and feminist movements in Pakistan.
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Delving into Charbel Samuel Aoun’s exploration of matter and kinetic artistry, the exhibition highlights the artist’s unique engagement with processes of co-creation and features new productions that bring to life earth, stones, wood, and wax through motors, amplifiers, and microphones. Running through each gallery is an installation showcasing the intricate weaving between matters and the continuum of movement.
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A group exhibition featuring selected pieces from Sama Alshaibi’s ‘Carry Over’ project and sculptures by Azza Al Qubaisi. By engaging in a direct dialogue with 19th century Orientalist portrait photographs of Middle Eastern women, captured by Western photographers, the exhibition critically explores the representations of Arab women in historical images and navigates the nuanced interplay of history, power, and representation to ultimately reclaim the narratives.
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This is Basmah Felemban’s first solo exhibition, presenting across three gallery spaces a backlog of documentation, experimentation and supporting material that built her decade-long portfolio of multimedia, research-based works. From looking at theoretical aesthetics of theological architecture to Islamic cosmology, she dovetails into ideas of seen and unseen universes, tapping into psychoanalytic concepts, memory and nostalgia.
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Zeynep Kayan’s latest works, initiating a dialogue between the self and repetition, conceived during her residency at Rijksakademie.
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The exhibition presents the second part of the personal collection of Homa Zarrabi with the efforts of Hassan and Hossein Rowshanbakht.
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Presenting a wide selection of works by Ozan Sağdıç (b. 1934), one of the most prominent names in the history of photography in Türkiye, the exhibition focuses on documentary photography, a widespread genre of photography in the world, while also shedding light on the country’s social, political, economic, cultural, and visual history from the 1950s to the present day.
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For this solo exhibition, Behrang Karimi brings new works together in a dialog in which continuities and connections emerge between painting, furniture, tapestry, drawings, and prints. These connections occasionally blend into the space of everyday life. Various events will be held during the exhibition, including a walk-through with Behrang Karimi and Kathrin Bentele, Director of the Kunstverein.
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An archival survey exhibition documenting France’s secret nuclear programme in Algeria during and after the Algerian Revolution (1954-62). This expansive research project, put together by architectural historian and exhibition maker Samia Henni, unfolds across a series of audio-visual assemblages — each consisting of maps, photographs, film, stills, documents and archival testimonies.
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The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is inviting visitors to rediscover the diversity of 20th-century Arab modernism and to take a fresh look at the history of art scenes still little known in Europe. Through a selection of over 200 works, most of which have never before been exhibited in France, this exhibition focuses on the relationship between Arab artists and Paris throughout the 20th century. With works by Etel Adnan, Nadia Saikali, Mona Saudi, and Juliana Seraphim, among many others.
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In this exhibition, the invited artists, Fırat Bingöl, Havin-Al Sindy, Maryna Markova/Dr. Olesya Chayka, Mehmet Ali Boran, Muhammed Kaya, among others, convey direct messages concerning environmental issues or provoke contemplation on sustainability through their creative endeavors.
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Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere is the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The part of the exhibtion called Nucleo Storico is gathering works from 20th century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and a number of rooms will feature works from these territories, much like an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism. Around forty artists who were active in the art contexts of West Asian and North Africa such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, and Tehran, are included in the exhibition, among them Dia al-Azzawi, Huguette Caland, Gazbia Sirry, Marwan, and Bahman Mohasses.
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