Chant Avedissian

Audio commentary

Constantly moving between the realms of what is considered 'high' and 'low' art, the Egyptian Armenian artists Chant Avedissian was acutely aware of the impact and legacy of Western colonialism, instead proposing an alternative modernity rooted in tradition. "Look East, everything is in Samarkand, in Bhukara, in Aleppo" he would say. Spending a decade working under the visionary Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, otherwise known as 'The Architect of the poor' who advocated for the use of local materials and was responsible for the revival of mud building in the 40s. Fathy challenged Avedissian to reconsider local artistic traditions and to appreciate the properties of common materials. In the mid-80s, Avedissian assembled an iconic body of textiles works that recount one of the most renowned Egyptian art forms - the Khayamiya - appliquéd tents, that had a twofold purpose as both shelter and ornament and were easily disassembled, folded, and transported. In these works, the material used is Damour, a popular and inexpensive Egyptian cotton deliberately chosen as an ode to Fathy's celebration of the vernacular.

Pharaonic triangles

collector

curator

Huguette Caland

Aya Haidar

Alfred Tarazi

Mona Saudi

Latif Al Ani

Monir Farmanfarmaian

Born in Beirut in 1980, in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, Alfred Tarazi is an artist that belongs to the postwar generation and whose work scrutinizes the traumatic events of its aftermath at all levels: political, geographic, and social. Using archival and historic records, magazines, books, posters, and newspaper archives he analyzes, retells, and processes the collective memory of Lebanon. 

The Lovers is an evolving multimedia installation exploring the Lebanese civil war through the personal stories of two presumably irreconcilable figures - that of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Ali Hassan Salameh and Georgina Rizk, the first and only Arab winner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant in 1971. How their worlds of glamour and radical revolution coincided is unknown. Yet Tarazi's study of their relationship helps us understand to wider movements shaking the Arab world at its core in the 70s, with Beirut at its epicenter: the Palestinian revolution which Salameh epitomized and the sexual liberation movement advocated in the world of popular culture of which Rizk was its poster child. The ramifications of both movements can still be felt across the region today. 

In this work, Tarazi uses two scrolls to narrate the story through a montage of images taken from their lives, reflecting the wider sociopolitical realities and popular culture of the time. The mechanism allows viewers to wind up the scrolls to unfold in any direction, harking to the traditional advertising screens. Salameh and Rizk's relationship presents another side of the conflict, embodying the resilience of love and the hope it carries with it.

This is a demonstration of the activation of The Lovers.

The Lovers

Aya Haidar's identity as a diasporic artist, activist, and full time mother is reflected clearly in her practice, which explores migration, memory, labor, domesticity, and womanhood. 

In her work, she often uses found and recycled objects reappropriated and intervened, often using embroidery and crafts. Seen here are works from her most recent series, Highly Strung. A durational body of work, she produced it during the pandemic while homebound caring for and homeschooling her three young children. Over the course of a year, she made a record of the countless invisible tasks she performed towards her household, recording one per day. Tasks such as wiping noses, changing bibs, doing laundry, to emptying the fridge. Gestures of care and acts of women that generally go unnoticed and unappreciated, but whose menial tasks are both physically and mentally intensive and add, on average, an extra 10 hours unpaid labor on top of a full time working woman's job. In a political gesture, she embroidered one act onto domestic items such as cleaning rags, cloths, and jeans - making visible these invisible acts which society overlooks. 

The pricing of the work is intrinsic to its conceptual understanding. Effectively calculating the cost of labor of every hour of the day over the course of a year, it attempts to quantify the labor force of motherhood, which is unpaid, undervalued, and ongoing.

ATHR

Highly Strung

Self-taught with a career spanning from the late 50s to the late 70s, Latif Al-Ani is considered the founding father of Iraqi photography. Starting his career as a photographer for the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1950, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958 migrated the company's photographers to what later became the Ministry of Culture. After the coup in 1958, Al-Ani started the process of archiving with intent - almost forecasting the political instability that would plague his country for years to come. 

His seminal work was produced over two decades. Often referred to as a 'golden age' for Iraq, it encompassed a period of increased cosmopolitanism and openness in the country. His archive was integral to capturing these transformations in urban and rural Iraqi society, offering a testimony of the transitional and prosperous moments in Iraq's modern history; the effect of the booming oil industry and the modernist project playing out across Baghdad. In 1980, the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war, coupled with the increased threat to photographers, made it impossible to continue his work and halted his career for good. 

A chance meeting with the artist Yto Barrada directed Al-Ani's archive to the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, in whose care they now lie. What motivated him throughout his career was the insistent urgency to document his country for posterity, leaving a record for the next generation and which took as its tenant the beauty of the image itself.

Isabelle van den Eynde

Palm orchards, Jadriya, Baghdad, 1970

Mona Saudi is a Jordanian artist, sculptor and poet living in Beirut and one of the few female artists of her generation to pursue sculpture. She grew up in a home in Amman, situated next to an old archaeological site surrounded by ancient ruins from the Nabateans who were stone carvers. This became her playground, leading her to develop a deep connection with stone - primal, ancient and enduring - and which became her long standing material of choice. It is within this material and earth which she feels she's a continuation of, and belongs to. 

Her sculptures always start with basic shapes: the square, circle, cylinder and rectangle, to which she carves movement into working with the energy of the stone; either repeating their forms, varying their depths or heights, or cutting them across one another to create new, graceful compositions, many of which are inspired by forms and beings found in nature: rivers, seeds, seagulls, as well as the prominent reoccurring theme of Mother Earth itself. Saudi uses of stone that originates from all over the world, the majority being from the Middle East, including Lebanese and Jordanian marble, as well as limestone, emphasizing how the Arab world is united by a common cultural language and history. 

Sunset in Pink is a thin rectangular form with rounded edges where a precise circular hole has been cut out near the middle of a pink tinted and limestone.

Lawrie Shabibi

Sunset in Pink

Monir Farmanfarmaian was an Iranian artist best known for her reverse glass painting and mirror mosaic, a distinct style which she formed in the late 60s and 70s and continued until her passing in 2019. Yet it is also her life story, which is fascinating. Monir grew up in Iran, leaving for New York in 1945, where she would spend nearly a decade as an art student and fashion illustrator working alongside Warhol, Milton Avery, Frank Stella and others, and hosting salons in her home where her Iranian dishes became a fixture. 

Once back in Iran during the cultural boom, she explored the arts and crafts of nomadic tribes, scouring the ancient architectural sites across the country, including a seminal visit to the Chaturanga King of Light shrine in Shiraz, where her experience of the space, ablaze with thousands of reflections created by the splinted mirrors, marked a turning point in her practice, ultimately leading to the production of her iconic three dimensional geometrical pieces. 

Mirror mosaics had been used as interior ornaments for centuries, mostly in shrines and palaces, with the technique dating back to the 16th century. Monir combined mirror mosaic with reverse glass painting using stucco plaster, an ancient building material widely used for decoration. These cut mirrors were then applied to geometrical patterns inspired by both Islamic art and architecture and Western geometric abstraction, producing a language of their own.

The Third Line

Untitled (Diamond 1-4) and Untitled (Triangle)

The late Huguette Caland is arguably one of the most fascinating feminist voices of her time, although her work was only studied very late in her life. Known for her other passion for life, her independence and sense of mischief, Caland led an unconventional life which was totally her own. She was a fixture of the Lebanese modernist movement and cultural scene in the 60s and 70s, which she abandoned, leaving her husband, lover and children behind to pursue her artistic and personal freedom in Paris. It was there that Caland achieved artistic recognition with her exuberant and erotically charged paintings that challenge traditional conventions of beauty and desire. Her use of lines always conveyed more than they represented the delicate trace of contours strategically placed charged lines which reveal just the hint of body parts, swelling forms and shapes, meeting one another. 

At the age of 34, she stopped wearing Western clothing in favor of Kaftans, or Abayas, which she first bought and then designed and painted herself as someone who had struggled with her larger body size or 'excess baggage' as she fondly called it. The Abaya became a way to liberate her body, an important part of her practice. Her risque designs would later catch the eye of the fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who invited her to design a line of 100 haute-couture kaftans, the 'Nour collection'.

Nour Collection 

I'm Salma Tuqan, a contemporary art and design curator and cultural strategist and Deputy Director of Delfina Foundation in London. The invitation from Preview was a really lovely opportunity to weave together an intergenerational selection of artists from across the Arab region whose work, I think, sheds light on local concerns and movements. 

Although it's not intended as a curated project, there are some overlapping themes within the selection, which include shifting perspectives towards modernism, an exploration of what could be considered 'high' and 'low' art, and its relations to craft and domesticity and invisible labor and both personal and collective histories is reflected through printed media. 

I hope you enjoy this selection.

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) is a private not-for-profit museum with the most important collection of European art in the southern hemisphere.

Art Dubai: Shifting perspectives on Modernism and the body

Art Dubai: Shifting perspectives on Modernism and the body