ArteEast’s Legacy Trilogy: Past, Present, Future catalogue

FUNDRAISING EXHIBITION

LEGACY TRILOGY

LEGACY TRILOGY PAST PRESENT FUTURE

ArteEast Fundraising Exhibition

ArteEast is pleased to present Legacy Trilogy: Past, Present, Future , an online fundraising exhibition launching from March 7 - April 30, 2021 on Artsy. Consisting of three chapters: Past, Present, Future ; the show celebrates ArteEast’s legacy of supporting artists and curators from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and its diasporas.

The Past edition features artists who have been part of ArteEast’s programming since its inception in 2003. The artists included range from emerging to those who have long been established in the contemporary art world, a number of whom appeared as young artists in early exhibitions by ArteEast. Other artists in the exhibition include participants from a range of ArteEast’s public programs over the years, including artist residencies, panel discussions, artist talks, and more.

For the Present edition ArteEast invited curators, scholars, and renowned voices within the field of contemporary art, with whom ArteEast has worked over the years, to nominate exhibiting artists. Nominators including Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi (Founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation), Stephen Stapleton (Founding Director of Edge of Arabia), Nathalie Ackawi (Co-Director of the Beirut Art Residency) and Anlam de Coster (Independent Curator) have nominated both established and emerging young artists for the Present edition.

Future looks ahead, creating a space for ArteEast to forge networks with new generations of artists. Selected by

the ArteEast curatorial team, the Future edition features practitioners who reflect intrepid voices from the MENA region and its diasporas.

PAST EDITION Rashwan Abdelbaki Ibrahim Ahmed Vartan Avakian Shayma Aziz Khaled Barakeh Mohamed Sabry Bastawy Nidhal Chamekh Ganzeer Tarek Al-Ghoussein Rhea Karam Ibrahim Khatab Huda Lutfi Nicky Nodjoumi Hamid Rahmanian Hamdy Reda Dahlia El Sayed Hadieh Shafie Lara Tabet Nihad Al Turk Sarp Kerem Yavuz

PRESENT EDITION

Artists (Nominators) Khalid Albaih (nominated by Stephen Stapleton) Hera Büyüktaşçıyan (nominated by Anlam de Coster) Aslı Çavuşoğlu (nominated by Anlam de Coster) Bady Dalloul (nominated by Line Ajan) Soha Elsirgany (nominated by Huda Lutfi) Diana Al Halabi (nominated by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi) Ahmed Mater (nominated by Stephen Stapleton) Lara Nasser (nominated by Nathalie Ackawi) Ruba Salameh (nominated by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi) Hammzat Tahabsim (nominated by Noura Al Khasawneh) Bassem Yousri (nominated by Lara Baladi) Yazan Zubi (nominated by Noura Al Khasawneh)

ARTEEAST CURATORIAL TEAM: Olivia Farhat, Lila Nazemian, Beth Stryker A RT SY. N E T/A RT E E A S T B E N E F I T @ A RT E E A S T. O R G

FUTURE EDITION Saks Afridi Yusef Alahmad Eleana Antonaki Lara Atallah Rafram Chaddad Yasmine Nasser Diaz Laila Tara H Samar Hejazi Sara Issakharian Hiba Kalache Laith Majali Orlee Malka Bibi Manavi Rehan Miskci Sara Ouhaddou Sara Rahmanian Alymamah Rashed Zeinab Saab Peyman Shafieezadeh Shabnam Yousefian Sofia Zubi

CONTENTS 07 PAST EDITION 41 PRESENT EDITION 63 FUTURE EDITION

PAST EDITION/ ARTISTS RASHWAN ABDELBAKI IBRAHIM AHMED VARTAN AVAKIAN SHAYMA AZIZ KHALED BARAKEH MOHAMED SABRY BASTAWY NIDHAL CHAMEKH GANZEER TAREK AL-GHOUSSEIN RHEA KARAM IBRAHIM KHATAB HUDA LUTFI NICKY NODJOUMI HAMID RAHMANIAN HAMDY REDA DAHLIA EL SAYED HADIEH SHAFIE LARA TABET NIHAD AL TURK SARP KEREM YAVUZ

PAST EDITION RASHWAN ABDELBAKI Momentum, 2009

Metal printing, print on arch paper 13.18 x 13.18 in 33.5 x 33.5 cm Edition 2 of 2

RASHWAN ABDELBAKI One Line, 2017

Acrylic on canvas 55.11 x 55.11 in 140 x 140 cm

IBRAHIM AHMED Untitled (Sketch) (from Hafriyat series), 2012 Mixed media on wood 24 x 24 in 61 x 61 cm

IBRAHIM AHMED Untitled (Sketch) (from Hafriyat series), 2012 Mixed media on wood 24 x 24 in 61 x 61 cm

artsy.net/arteeast

PAST EDITION

VARTAN AVAKIAN

Suspended Silver: Dispersion 004, 2015 Inkjet on archival photo paper 35.4 x 47.2 in 90 x 120 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

SHAYMA AZIZ

Yoga Study II, 2015 Ink on paper 19.63 x 25.5 in 49.9 x 64.8 cm

KHALED BARAKEH

I Haven’t Slept In Centuries, 2018 Print on paper 78.7 x 54.9 in 200 x 139.5 cm Edition 2 of 5

MOHAMED SABRY BASTAWY By the River, 2017

Ink and highlighter pen on paper 12 × 9.1 in 30.5 x 23 cm

artsy.net/arteeast

PAST EDITION

NIDHAL CHAMEKH

Étude Pour La Série Le Battement des Ailes #1, 2017 Graphite inks and transfer on cotton paper 9.05 x 12.2 in 23 x 31 cm

NIDHAL CHAMEKH

Étude Pour La Série Le Battement des Ailes #2, 2017 Graphite inks and transfer on cotton paper 9.05 x 12.2 in 23 x 31 cm

GANZEER

Immigrant Blues #3: Molokheya, 2019 Mixed media over 1-color screenprint on kraft board 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm

TAREK AL-GHOUSSEIN K Files (735), 2013

Archival digital print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 4 of 6 + 2 AP

artsy.net/arteeast

PAST EDITION TAREK AL-GHOUSSEIN

Untitled 10 (Self Portrait Series), 2003-2005 Archival digital print 35.4 x 23.6 in 90 x 60 cm Edition 3 of 6 + 2 AP

RHEA KARAM

XX, (from the series All Roads Lead to You), 2018 Archival pigment print, silkscreen and pencil 17 x 22 in 43.2 x 55.9 cm AP, Edition of 5 + AP

RHEA KARAM

Echoing Silence, 2013 Archival pigment print 39.4 x 51.1 in 100 x 130 cm Edition 1 of 3

IBRAHIM KHATAB Kimt, 2019

Mixed media 47.5 x 47.5 in 120 x 120 cm

artsy.net/arteeast

PAST EDITION

IBRAHIM KHATAB Untitled, 2017

Acrylic on paper 44.5 × 39 in 113 × 99.1 cm

IBRAHIM KHATAB Untitled, 2017

Acrylic on paper 17.5 x 15.4 in 44.5 x 39 cm

HUDA LUTFI

Portraits from Tahrir, 2013 Mixed media, collage, photography, paint on wood 15.4 in diameter (each) 39 cm diameter (each) 14 portraits Edition 1 of 2

NICKY NODJOUMI Pulling, 2017

Ink on paper 28.5 x 22.5 in 72.4 x 57.2 cm

artsy.net/arteeast

PAST EDITION

HAMID RAHMANIAN

The Battle of Rostam and Sohrab Drags On, 2010 Digital print on metallic museum paper 13 x 19 in 33 x 48.3 cm Edition 11 of 15

HAMID RAHMANIAN

The Nightmare of Siavosh, 2010 Digital print on metallic museum paper 13 x 19 in 33 x 48.3 cm Edition 13 of 15

HAMDY REDA

The Backyard of Paradise (#2), 2019 Archival inkjet print 23.62 x 35.43 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 2 of 6

HAMDY REDA

Through My Kitchen Window (#1), 2019 Archival inkjet print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 2 of 6

artsy.net/arteeast

PAST EDITION

DAHLIA EL SAYED

A Twist, A Question, 2011 Acrylic on water color paper 4 panels 15 x 45 in (each panel) 38.1 x 114.3 cm (each panel)

HADIEH SHAFIE Cube, 2020

Rolled paper with embedded text, ink and acrylic in hand cut spiked cube 7 x 7 x 7 in 17.8 × 17.8 × 17.8 cm

LARA TABET

Underbelly, Vaginal Fluid 01, 2017 Micrography/archival pigment print 15 x 15 in 38.1 x 38.1 cm Edition 1 of 5 + AP

LARA TABET

Eleven Fragmented Seas, Sea 01, 2020 Bacteria on color film/archival pigment print 39.4 x 49.2 in 100 x 125 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

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PAST EDITION

NIHAD AL TURK Table, 2010

Oil and pencil on canvas 55.1 x 63 in 140 x 160 cm

SARP KEREM YAVUZ Amin, 2016

Archival inkjet print 15.7 x 15.7 in 40 x 40 cm Edition 4 of 5 + 2AP

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PAST EDITION

RASHWAN ABDELBAKI Momentum, 2009

Metal printing, print on arch paper 13.18 x 13.18 in 33.5 x 33.5 cm Edition 2 of 2

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Rashwan Abdelbaki is a Syrian visual artist based in NYC since January 2017. He specializes in painting and printmaking and was born in 1984 in As-Suwayda City, Syria. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus in 2007 with a Bachelor’s degree in printmaking. He has received numerous fellowships and awards including from the Artist Protection Fund, American Academy in Rome, Vermont Studio Center, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Westbeth. His work has been shown internationally, including at the Queens Museum, Equity Gallery, Art Expo NY, George Mason University, and Montoro12 Contemporary Art Gallery, Rome. His artworks exist in Syria, Lebanon, UAE, Germany, France, South Korea, London, Rome, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Washington DC.

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PAST EDITION

RASHWAN ABDELBAKI One Line, 2017

Acrylic on canvas 55.11 x 55.11 in 140 x 140 cm

ARTIST STATEMENT While the portrait of Syria has been painted in the media mostly with images of war and destruction, as a Syrian émigré artist I have sought to challenge stereotypes and perceptions that ignore or disregard a country that has provided much to enrich human civilization and represents a wonderful mosaic of more than 18 religions. My work explores some of the most pressing issues of our time including fear mongering, immigration, discrimination, racism, religion, and politics, with vivid colors and dynamic interactions creating an ongoing conversation. The people in my artwork are prisoners of their own beliefs, I paint them with striped garments in empty cells and domestic settings. In recent works I have been more abstract focused on the face, the open eye, and physical lines that represent our abilities and freedom. In these works, there is a clear, physical line above the human who looks like he is drowning but still holding on to hope.

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PAST EDITION

IBRAHIM AHMED Untitled (Sketch) (from Hafriyat series), 2012 Mixed media on wood 24 x 24 in 61 x 61 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in Kuwait (1984), Ibrahim Ahmed spent his childhood between Bahrain and Egypt before moving to the US at the age of thirteen. In 2014, he relocated to Cairo, where he currently lives and works in the informal neighborhood of Ard El Lewa. Ahmed’s manipulations of material, especially textile, are informed by research into the histories and movements of peoples and objects. His works in mixed media, sculpture, and installation engage with subjects related to colonization, structures of power, cultural interactions, and fluid identity, generating discussion around ideas of the self and notions of authenticity with the parameters of the nation-state.

Ahmed has shown his work in solo exhibitions at Primary, Nottingham (2019); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome (2018); Gallery Nosco, Marseille (2018); Volta Art Fair, New York (2016); Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2016); artellewa art space, Giza (2014) and Solo(s) Project House, Newark (2010). His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Sharjah Art Museum, 13th edition of the Biennial of Dakar - Dak’art, 13th Havana Biennial, 4th International Biennial of Casablanca, 12th edition of the Bamako Encounters - African Biennale of Photography.

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PAST EDITION

IBRAHIM AHMED Untitled (Sketch) (from Hafriyat series), 2012 Mixed media on wood 24 x 24 in 61 x 61 cm

HAFRIYAT SERIES In the series Hafriyat (meaning: excavation) Ramadan fabric, layered with gold, and black paint are used in the paintings to reference cotton, gold, and oil. Throughout the history of colonization, these resources were and continue to be factors in the exploitation of countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The common thread that ties these continents together is the systematic tool of erasure that ensured the enslavement of the native. The settler erased the native’s history, culture, and language. Ultimately, he erased their humanity. In this series, the act of erasure becomes a method that identifies the painting. By physically removing the layers of paint I allow the viewer to recognize and acknowledge the painting. In this context, the process of erasure becomes a form of liberation for the native, rather than a form of oppression.

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PAST EDITION

VARTAN AVAKIAN

Suspended Silver: Dispersion 004, 2015 Inkjet on archival photo paper 35.4 x 47.2 in 90 x 120 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Vartan Avakian is an artist working with video, photography and sculpture. He studied Communication Arts at the Lebanese American University and Architecture and Urban Culture at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Avakian’s work has been shown at MuCEM, Marseille; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Apexart, New York; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; MAXXI, Rome; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Beirut Art Center, CCA Warsaw; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Transmediale 2K+12, Berlin; Sharjah Biennial X, Sharjah; Home Works V, Beirut; Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; The Cube, Taipei; South London Gallery, London. Avakian is a board member of the Arab Image Foundation and is a recipient of the Abraaj Group Art Prize. He is represented by Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki and Marfa’ Projects, Beirut.

SUSPENDED SILVER Suspended Silver is a photographic series made from silver

particles collected from found film stock debris. Over time, damaged film negatives that had lost some of their lightsensitive silver crystals on which images form and had become part of the dust covering the space in which they were found. By finding and printing these silver particles – the material equivalent of pixels – the composition of

information that produced the original photographs is reshaped into opaque remains that bare the physical and formal traces of the original photographs, all the while rendering them remote and cryptic relics.

The project deploys chemical procedures that synthesize archaeological and narrative strands of information ossified in dust into artifacts. Silver particles were mined and separated from the dust to form the material base for the photographic series. The light-sensitive silver particles that were once the medium on which photographic information was inscribed are considered inscriptions in their own right and are printed as photographs.

Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust is comprised of artworks that are based on dust. It stems from an understanding of dust as “remains”—as a material index of human and nonhuman activity that is continuously formed and accumulated by and on objects, bodies and spaces. It identifies biological debris in dust and examines the relation between dust and memory, as well as monumentality.

The iteration of the project features artworks that deploy chemical procedures in order to synthesize the archaeological and narrative strands of information, ossified in biological debris, into artifacts that become, in their turn, material ciphers waiting to be decoded and recombined. The project proposes the act of memorial—or monument-making, as fundamentally an act of delineating the space of remains to be deemed significant and worthy of preservation or commemoration.

Monumentality, in that sense, inheres not in scale per se, but in the space delineated by the dust created over time, thus making the memorial or monument a structure that indicates the locus of the historical and material “weight” that has accumulated—settled—over time.

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PAST EDITION

SHAYMA AZIZ

Yoga Study II, 2015 Ink on paper 19.63 x 25.5 in 49.9 x 64.8 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Shayma Aziz is a visual artist whose work combines traditional fine arts technicality with new media practices, focusing particularly on painting, sculpture, interdisciplinary projects and animation. Born in Asyut, Egypt, Aziz obtained her BFA in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Luxor, where she investigated representational formats in ancient Egyptian art.

Later she moved to Cairo and became actively engaged in its growing art scene for seventeen years. She received several production and residency grants, including Al Mawred Al Thaqafi’s Production Grant, Centre d’Arte i Natura’s residency program (2010), L’officina Marseille (2011), Siwa Studios residency (2013) and 3rd place prize at Caravan’s Global Mosaic exhibition (2019). She moved to New York in the spring of 2019, where she is currently based.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions in Cairo, Alexandria, Berlin, New York, Thessaloniki, Tehran, Beirut, Tunis, Terni, Amsterdam and Marseilles. Her audio light installation piece “Death of a Dress” was exhibited in Altars, Grottos and Portals at the Park Church Co-op in NYC (2019).

Her audio light installation piece Death of a Dress was exhibited in Altars, Grottos and Portals at the Park Church Co-op in NYC (2019). Her large-scale ink painting series A State of Body was shown in 392 Rmeil 393 contemporary art gallery in Beirut (2016) and Goethe Institute in Cairo (2018).

Her drawing installation Floating Over the Cairene Sky was exhibited in Cairo at Artellewa Arts Space, examining urban decay and the taboo/criminalization of public displays of affection in Egypt.

Women in Black at ZicoHouse Beirut (2009) mourns the

disappearance of the female figure from public space in Arab cities, depicting figures in ghostly poses borrowed from Modern Art history’s dominant male gaze.

Her New York Live Arts painting/performance live mural At WAR(k) at Live Ideas Festival: MENA/Future Cultural Transformations in the Middle East North Africa Region (2016) looks at fallen bodies, the poetics of war murals, mass immigration, and different temporalities between labour, dreamers, dance and drowning. Aziz is currently engaged in her work in progress: To Bestialize Her, which looks at animal metaphors used towards women in folk belief, and how misogyny is embedded and normalized in everyday language to subdue and alienate women.

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PAST EDITION

KHALED BARAKEH

I Haven’t Slept In Centuries, 2018 Print on paper 78.7 x 54.9 in 200 x 139.5 cm Edition 2 of 5

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Khaled Barakeh is a Berlin-based conceptual artist and cultural activist. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, Syria, in 2005, completed his MFA in 2010 at Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark, and a Meisterschuler study in 2013 at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt, Germany. Driven by his observations of longstanding social injustice, Barakeh approaches creative practice as a tool for societal change, manipulating commonplace visual and cultural touchstones to expose and undermine stagnant power structures.

In the creation of this work, a multitude of granted visas, passed checkpoints and denials were extracted from the artist’s old Syrian passports and crowded onto a single page. There is a tipping point in this accumulation; years of unceasing movement between different countries coalesce into a mass that outweighs the original identity encoded within the passport. As the layers of ink become more and more opaque, it is increasingly obscured, a tiny fraction disappearing with each stamp.

In a recent major shift in his practice, Barakeh developed coculture in 2017 - a non-for-profit umbrella organization with a suite of initiatives that leverage artistic thinking to directly address issues of contemporary mass migration. Among these projects is the SYRIA Cultural Index and the Syrian Biennale. Barakeh has exhibited at Hamburger Kunsthalle, The 11th Shanghai Biennale, The Frankfurter Kunstverein, Salt Istanbul, The Busan Biennale, State Gallery of Lower Austria, Krems and MKG Hamburg, among many others.

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PAST EDITION

MOHAMED SABRY BASTAWY By the River, 2017

Ink and highlighter pen on paper 12 × 9.1 in 30.5 x 23 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Mohamed Sabry is a painter and sculptor whose work has received over eleven national art awards. He has exhibited in over 63 group exhibitions in Egypt, and participated in over 23 symposiums and workshops around the world, Sabry moves seamlessly from painting to sculpture, with his quintessentially Egyptian figures stretched tall and proud whether in paint or in sculpture.

He mixes various artistic media, such as sculpture, drawing and painting creating his own special world—a world inspired by a blend of civilizations, and a vast cultural heritage. When you look at his works, you feel you are floating in a vast Persian mosaic among Assyrian sculptures that have a Nubian character, and swimming amid human beings and other creatures suspended between reality and imagination in a state of balanced absurdity. All this creates a world of contemporary folk art that carries within its shapes and styles originality, innovation and the particularity of identity.

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PAST EDITION

NIDHAL CHAMEKH

NIDHAL CHAMEKH

Graphite inks and transfer on cotton paper 9.05 x 12.2 in 23 x 31 cm

Graphite inks and transfer on cotton paper, 9.05 x 12.2 in 23 x 31 cm

Étude Pour La Série Le Battement des Ailes #1, 2017

Étude Pour La Série Le Battement des Ailes #2, 2017

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in 1985 in Dahmani, Tunisia, Nidhal Chamekh graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Tunis and the University of Sorbonne in Paris. He continues to work and live between the two cities. Nidhal’s creations reflect on the times we inhabit. His artwork is situated at the intersections of the biographic and the political, the lived and the historical, the event and the archive.

From drawing to installations, and from photography to videos, Nidhal Chamekh’s oeuvres dissect the constitution of our contemporary identity. His artwork has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Aïchi Triennale, the Yinchuan Biennial, the Dakar Biennial and has been shown in Tunis at Politics Collective exhibitions, in Paris at The Arab World Institute, The Drawing Now, in Italy at FM Contemporary Art Center, in London at Drawing Room, during 1:54 Art Fair and in Art Basel and the Hood Museum among others.

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PAST EDITION

GANZEER

Immigrant Blues #3: Molokheya, 2019 Mixed media over screenprint on kraft board 30 x 22 in 76.2 x 55.9 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Described as a “chameleon” by Carlo McCormick in the New York Times, Ganzeer operates seamlessly between art, design, and storytelling, creating what he has coined Concept Pop. As described by Artforum, his medium of choice is “a little bit of everything: stencils, murals, paintings, pamphlets, comics, installations, and graphic design.”

With over 40 exhibitions to his name, Ganzeer’s work has been seen in a wide variety of art galleries, impromptu spaces, alleyways, and major museums around the world, such as The Brooklyn Museum in New York, The Palace of the Arts in Cairo, Greek State Museum in Thessaloniki, the V&A in London, and the Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg.

Ganzeer’s current projects include a short story collection titled TIMES NEW HUMAN, and a sci-fi graphic novel titled THE SOLAR GRID, which has awarded him a Global Thinker Award from Foreign Policy in 2016.

He has been an artist-in-residence in Germany, Poland, Jordan, Holland, and Finland, and has lived extensively in Cairo, New York, Los Angeles, Denver, and finally Houston— where he is now based.

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PAST EDITION

TAREK AL-GHOUSSEIN K Files (735), 2013

Archival digital print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 4 of 6 + 2 AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Tarek Al-Ghoussein is a UAE-based Kuwaiti artist of Palestinian origin. He is Professor of Visual Art at NYU Abu Dhabi. Much of Al-Ghoussein’s professional work deals with how his identity is shaped in a context of inaccessibility and loss. His work explores the boundaries between landscape photography, self-portraiture and performance art. Choosing locations much in the same way a film director does, he moves between abstraction and the specific circumstances found in particular places. Relying on subtle interventions and non-invasive interactions, the images consider various aspects of “identity.”

Al-Ghoussein has exhibited extensively in Europe, the United States and The Middle East and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in prominent venues such as MOMA PS1,the 53rd and 55th Venice Biennales; the Singapore Biennale; the 6th and 7th Sharjah Biennales.

His most recent solo shows include Nevada Museum of Art, Brigitte Schenk in Germany, The Third Line in Dubai and Taymour Grahne in New York City.

Al-Ghoussein’s work has been acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; Freer and Sackler Gallery at Smithsonian Institution—Washington D.C., USA, Museum of Fine Art—Houston, Texas, USA the British Museum, London, Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the Sharjah Art Foundations; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo; the Royal Photography Museum in Copenhagen; and the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, among several others.

K FILES

The images rely on performance-based photography to examine how contemporary development in Kuwait has transformed the urban landscape that was once familiar. The photographs map historically significant locations and focus on the impact of scale and the interplay between space and the individual.

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PAST EDITION

TAREK AL-GHOUSSEIN

Untitled 10 (Self Portrait Series), 2003-2005 Archival digital print 35.4 x 23.6 in 90 x 60 cm Edition 3 of 6 + 2 AP

SELF PORTRAIT SERIES This project started as a result of my growing frustration with the way in which the Palestinians and other Arabs were being (mis)represented in the media. Transcending media representations is an ongoing challenge for all Arabs, and especially for Palestinians. The Self-Portrait Series represents a commentary on common media representations of the Palestinian as terrorist.

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PAST EDITION

RHEA KARAM

XX, from the series All Roads Lead to You, 2018

RHEA KARAM

Echoing Silence, 2013

Archival pigment print, silkscreen and pencil 17 x 22 in 43.2 x 55.9 cm AP, Edition of 5 + AP

Archival pigment print 39.4 x 51.1 in 100 x 130 cm Edition 1 of 3

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Rhea Karam (b.1982 in Lebanon, lives and works in New York) grew up between France and the United States.

Her work focuses on deconstructing the urban landscape with an emphasis on public walls and the role they play in our daily lives. The enriching dialogue created around and upon walls allows her to explore various themes such as history, displacement, identity, communication, censorship, architecture and the environment. Although mainly photographic, her practice also includes paint, silkscreen, wheat pasting and various mixed media inspired by street art. Her work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions internationally and is part of permanent collections such as Yale Library, the Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Center for Book Arts.

All Roads Lead to You is a succession of snippets taken

along a meditative walk through the streets of New York. The abstract quality of the images do not intend to portray the place in which the work was made, but rather emphasize how homogeneous and indistinguishable the urban landscapes in our cities have become.To better understand how one constructs a personal identity within these surroundings, the artist examines the relationships between lines and borders on sidewalks and buildings to observe how they come together, interact and ultimately shape and guide our every day journeys.The asymmetrical composition illustrates how two different spaces divided by a border can exist inclusively side by side, rather than being divided.

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PAST EDITION

IBRAHIM KHATAB Kimt, 2019

Mixed media 47.5 x 47.5 in 120 x 120 cm

ARTSY BIOGRAPHY Ibrahim Khatab was born in Cairo in 1984, where he currently lives and works as a teacher in Cairo University.

He mixes painting, video art and installation in his artworks.

His passion for Arabic calligraphy is reflected in his work.

Khatab has had a number of solo exhibitions, beginning with The Box at Gezira Art Center in 2013, followed by Selem El-Elizeh at Art Lounge gallery in 2015.

He has participated in many group exhibitions in Egypt and abroad; starting with The Youth Salon in its 17th, 19th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 25th and 26th exhibitions, the Bamco Biennale (2011), the Artist Book biennale (2008), Art Fair Supermarket in Sweden (2015), What Happens Now at Gallery Dai in Oman (2014), Arabian Youth Salon in Doha (2014), Cape Town Art Fair in South Africa (2016), and AlSharqa Biennale for calligraphy (2016). Khatab has led numerous workshops in Egypt and abroad, in the Visual Arts Center in Doha, Fine Arts Association in Oman, and Sharqa Biennale for children.

He obtained 21st youth salon prize and the prize for the best video art piece in the Redbull competition. He participated in the 2018 Alive Memory exhibition, 2019 FNB Art fair, 2019 Fusion Vol.2, 2019 Counter Current exhibition, and the 2020 Fusion Vol.3 at Eclectica Contemporary, Capetown.

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PAST EDITION

IBRAHIM KHATAB

IBRAHIM KHATAB

Acrylic on paper 44.5 × 39 in 113 × 99.1

Acrylic on paper 17.5 x 15.4 in 44.5 x 39 cm

Untitled, 2017

Untitled, 2017

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PAST EDITION

HUDA LUTFI

Portraits from Tahrir, 2013 Mixed media, collage, photography, paint on wood 15.4 in diameter (each) 39 cm diameter (each) 14 portraits Edition 1 of 2

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Huda Lutfi works like an urban archeologist, digging up found objects and images as loaded fragments of history. She then re-packages them using bricolage as an interceptive strategy.

Recognizable objects, images and icons are re-contextualized and made to tell a different story, playing on personal and collective memory as well as shared iconographies, Lutfi blurs historical timelines and cultural boundaries in her work. Multi-layered and playful, Lutfi is known to work with a wide range of media, painting, collage, installations, assemblages, photomontage and video.

Trained as a cultural historian and, with her second career as an artist, Huda Lutfi emerged as one of Egypt’s contemporary image-makers. She received her Doctorate in Islamic Culture and History from McGill University, Montreal, Canada (1983), and has been teaching at the American University in Cairo until 2010.

Drawing upon the historical, cultural and local experiences of her society, Lutfi began exhibiting her art work in the mid 1990s. She has exhibited locally and internationally in both international galleries and museums: Alexandria, Cairo, Paris, Marseille, London, The Hague, Frankfurt, Bonn, Vienna, Thessalonika, Singapore, Virginia, Texas, Ohio, Dakar, Bamako, Tunisia, Bahrain and Dubai. Lutfi currently lives and works in Cairo.

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PAST EDITION

NICKY NODJOUMI Pulling, 2017

Ink on paper 28.5 x 22.5 in 72.4 x 57.2 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Brooklyn-based artist Nicky Nodjoumi was born in Kermanshah, Iran in 1941. Earning a Bachelor’s degree in art from Tehran University of Fine Arts before relocating to the United States in the late 1960s, Nodjoumi received his Master’s degree in Fine Arts from The City College of New York in 1974.

Nodjoumi’s works are conceived of as theatrical stages, where compositions of figures both serious and ridiculous, in the words of Phong Bui, “house meanings without irony, narratives without stories, humor without morality, above all creating a space that heightens the awareness of old and new history.”

Returning to Tehran to join the faculty of his alma mater, Nodjoumi joined his politically galvanized students in their criticism of the Shah’s regime, designing political posters inspired by the revolutionary spirit sweeping the country, only to be exiled once more in the aftermath of the revolution.

Serious in subject matter and witty in execution, these rich and diverse characters enliven Nodjoumi’s narratives and allude to collective experiences underpinned by sociopolitical struggles, articulating the full spectrum of feelings from aggression to victimhood.

This political engagement has continued to the present day. His nuanced figurative paintings engage in political discourse with a light, satirical touch, layering his personal heritage and lived experiences in Iran and the United States into scenes that resonate beyond specific historical contexts or geographical boundaries.

Nicky Nodjoumi’s works are in several prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum in London, the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi and the National Museum of Cuba. In 2014, Nicky had a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art titled The Accident. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.

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PAST EDITION

HAMID RAHMANIAN

HAMID RAHMANIAN

Digital print on metallic museum paper 13 x 19 in 33 x 48.3 cm Edition 11 of 15

Digital print on metallic musuem paper 13 x 19 in 33 x 48.3 cm Edition 13 of 15

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Hamid Rahmanian is a 2014 John Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 United States Artists Fellowship. His work centers on theater, moving image, and graphic arts. His projects have been exhibited in international competitions, publications and festivals. He undertook the immense task of illustrating and commissioning a new translation and adaptation of the tenth-century Persian epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, entitled Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings (2013). This best-selling 600-page art book, which the Wall Street Journal lauded as a “masterpiece,” is currently in its seventh printing.

The prints that are exhibited as part of ArteEast’s Legacy Trilogy exhibition series are illustrations Rahmanian created for the 2013 edition of the best-selling 600-page art book,

The Battle of Rostam and Sohrab Drags On, 2010

The Nightmare of Siavosh, 2010

Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings.

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PAST EDITION

HAMDY REDA

HAMDY REDA

Inkjet print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 2 of 6

Archival inkjet print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 2 of 6

Through My Kitchen Window (#1), 2019

The Backyard of Paradise (#2), 2019

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Hamdy Reda is a visual artist, curator and cultural activist, living and working between Egypt and Germany. Born in Cairo in 1972, Reda holds a BFA - Painting with honors from University of Helwan, Cairo (1997), and took part in numerous workshops and training programs in art history, curation and cultural management throughout his career.

His images are created with a local Egyptian eye, but are adept at communicating with the international art scene. In general, his artworks resonate between aesthetic and poetic values on the one hand, and the objective concept on the other.

Alongside his artistic career, he founded Artellewa, an artist residency space located in Ard El Lewa, a popular district in Giza. For 10 years, Reda served as the Artistic Director of the space, where he received over 100 local and international artists and sought to activate a dialogue between the artists and the community.

Reda’s work has been exhibited at many venues within Egypt as well as around the world, and he is a recipient of various artistic awards, which, together with the interest of art critics in his work, is evidence of his high profile as an artistic talent. Reda’s artwork includes several visual mediums, such as painting, experimental photography, installation, and interactive art works.

Reda’s work reflects an image of his social, political and urban environment in Egypt, with its many contradictions, beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, modernity and underdevelopment.

His involvement in the curating and management of many art and cultural activities locally and internationally reflects his interest in promoting the language of creative dialogue and developing mechanisms for artistic interaction.

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PAST EDITION

DAHLIA EL SAYED

A Twist, A Question, 2011 Acrylic on water color paper 4 panels 15 x 45 in (each panel) 38.1 x 114.3 cm (each panel)

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Dahlia El Sayed is an artist and writer who makes text and image-based work that synthesizes an internal and external experience of place, connecting the ephemeral to the concrete. She writes short fictions for created landscapes that take the form of narrative paintings, print and installation.

Her work has been exhibited widely including the 12th Cairo Biennale, Robert Miller Gallery, BravinLee Programs, The New Jersey State Museum and Aljira Center for Contemporary Art and is in the public collections of the Newark Museum, the Zimmerli Museum, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, the US Department of State, amongst others.

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PAST EDITION

HADIEH SHAFIE Cube, 2021

Rolled paper with embedded text, ink and acrylic in hand cut spiked cube 7 x 7 x 7 in 17.78 x 17.78 x 17.78 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Hadieh Shafie is a visual artist based in New York. Her work collapses the space between drawing, painting and sculpture and is at once process-oriented and overwhelming in its intricacy. Shafie’s work is in the following public collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Victoria and Albert Museum; Bank of America, Corporation Collection; Art in Embassies, Public Collection Dubai, UAE; The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Winter Park, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The British Museum and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Shafie holds an MFA in imaging and digital arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Hadieh Shafie’s iconic paper scroll artworks are a reinterpretation of the tradition of calligraphic script and bookmaking present in Islamic art. These pieces are comprised of thousands of paper strips that have been hand painted and inscribed, then intricately rolled together into scrolls or miniature ketabs (books), and finally placed within a frame. A recurring element across Shafie’s works is the hidden nature of text from the surface of the paper, whether it be a repeated word or poem verses.

Shafie has been the recipient of grants from the Kress Foundation, RTKL and MSAC Individual Artist Grant (2010 and 2008) and the Mary Sawyers Baker awards from the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund (2009) and Franz and Virginia Bader Fund (2011) and her work was shortlisted for the Jameel Prize (2011). She was an awardee of the 2012 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program . Most recently, Hadieh Shafie was Nominated for the Anonymous Was a Woman award in 2017.

This interest in occulting text can be traced back to Shafie’s childhood and adolescence growing up in post revolutionary Iran, where the influence of books on political and social affairs was highly scrutinized and policed by the newly established government. Books and poetry were conversely also a means of mental escape from the subsequent years of political turmoil during the Iran-Iraq war.

This results in the reversal of the traditional relationship between image and text within Islamic art traditions, where visuals have systematically been subservient to the narrative script. In Shafie’s works, the created abstract images obscure and contain the written texts.

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PAST EDITION

LARA TABET

Underbelly, Vaginal Fluid 01, 2017

Micrography/archival pigment print 15 x 15 in 38.1 x 38.1 cm Edition 1 of 5 + AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Lara Tabet (b. 1983 Achkout, Lebanon) is a practicing medical doctor and visual artist. In 2012, after finishing her residency in Clinical Pathology at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, Tabet completed a one-year full-time program at the International Center of Photography in New York and was the recipient of the Lisette Model scholarship.

Her work has been featured throughout the Arab world, USA and Europe. Her exhibitions include L’intrus, Tabakalera International Centre for contemporary culture, San Sebastian (2018) Underbelly, Galerie Eulenspiegel, Basel, Switzerland (2018), Notas Al Futuro, Galeria Breve, Mexico (2017), Regards sur Beyrouth, La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille (2016), I spy with my little eye, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2015), Off the wall on the wall, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles (2014), Exposure 5, Beirut Art Center, Beirut (2013).

Tabet received grants from AFAC (Arab Fund for Art and Culture) and Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafi; she was the recipient of the Daylight Photo Award Juror’s Pick for her project The Reeds and was awarded the ArteEast fellowship for the Art Omi residency.

Her artistic practice is informed by her background in pathology and inspects the legacy of trauma in Lebanon. Her work contemplates the relationship between the individual and public/private space in connection to gender, sexuality, and identity. More recently, her practice has shifted towards arts and sciences. Her ongoing research focuses on water as a site of political speculation as well as DNA as a medium for archiving.

UNDERBELLY Underbelly is a photographic installation that follows the trail of an imagined serial killer in the city of Beirut. It is loosely based on Roberto Bolaño’s detective novel 2666 , which chronicles the murder of one hundred and twelve women in Santa Teresa and the fruitless police investigation that stems from it.

As the bodies pile up, a vision of a city riddled by an underlying evil emerges. Lara Tabet ventures into the city’s outskirts, offering a portrait of Beirut at night through a fictional narrative of unsolved murders.

The tableau photographs are taken with a large-format camera. They portray crime scenes in which women’s lifeless bodies lie almost imperceptible in the theatricality of nocturnal urban space.

The tableaux are juxtaposed with microscopic photos depicting bodily fluids used in criminalistics and snapshots of fake evidence from the crime scenes, the aesthetic of which is reminiscent of forensic photography.

These visuals highlight the differential meaning an object produces when transformed into a photographic subject and reference the history of photography and its longstanding relationship to crime.

From the widespread usage of forensic images as an evidence-gathering tool, to the inevitable transformation of the crime scene into the site of contemporary narrative speculation and fiction, murder questions notions of truth and perception.

While trespassing to take these photos, Tabet was often stopped and questioned by the police and local security. The artist uses photography as a performative and transgressive gesture, one that recurs throughout her practice, through her exploration of liminal spaces, or zones at the edge of the public and the private. By choosing to photograph “dead” women, she directs a female gaze upon representations of violent acts of hypersexualization against women’s bodies, thus subverting gender roles.

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PAST EDITION

LARA TABET

Eleven Fragmented Seas, Sea 01, 2020 Bacteria on color film/archival pigment print 39.4 x 49.2 in 100 x 125 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

ELEVEN FRAGMENTED SEAS Bordered by the Mediterranean sea and home to numerous rivers and groundwaters, Lebanon is considered a waterrich country in an overall arid region. This heritage has always been at the heart of strategic geopolitical struggles as well as corrupt local politics. Immediately after the civil war, the coastline became the site of real estate speculations as illegal constructions started popping up.

From an ecological standpoint, the water is heavily polluted from chemical spills, untreated sewages and the garbage that overflows from neighboring leaking landfills. The seashore is a tool of power, and the government lets it deteriorate to justify its future privatization.

Through the study of seawater, Tabet comments on the neoliberalist politics that transformed the Lebanese waterscape by mapping its microbiological content.

Tabet travels throughout Lebanon from South to North, withdrawing a water sample every twenty km and inoculating it onto large format color film. A photographer and medical biologist, Lara Tabet crosses forensics bacteriology with landscape photography.

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PAST EDITION

NIHAD AL TURK Table, 2010

Oil and pencil on canvas 55.1 x 63 in 140 x 160 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1972 amidst abject poverty, Nihad Al Turk has developed a mature painting style against all odds.

With no academic training but several years of practice and experimentation behind him, he has established himself within the contemporary Syrian art scene as one of the most sought after painters.

With participation in a number of group exhibitions at venues such as Ayyam Gallery Dubai, Beirut’s UNESCO palace, and the Park Avenue Armory in New York, his profile has quickly risen over the last decade. Al Turk’s haunting mixed media canvases are highly influenced by his outlook on life and political convictions.

Believing that man is innately flawed and that only through an existence filled with love can there be human progress, he drafts compositions that hint at the injustices of the world around us.

He does so with a sophisticated technique of flattening space and utilizing color fields and patterns to give illusions of depth and dimension. Creating an aesthetic that is based on the tradition of still life painting yet is dominated by symbolic representation, his works employ a detailed system of signs that allude to profound philosophical conclusions.

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PAST EDITION

SARP KEREM YAVUZ Amin, 2016

Archival inkjet print 15.7 x 15.7 in 40 x 40 cm Edition 4 of 5 + 2AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in Paris in 1991 and raised in Istanbul, Sarp Kerem Yavuz is a visual artist working with photography, light projection, neon, and video. His works explore gender, politics, religion, and violence. He is the recipient of several international accolades, including the 2016 Palm Springs Photo Festival Emerging Photographer award, the 2013 New Artists Society Award, the 2013 Leah Freed Memorial Prize.

In 2013, he became the youngest artist to exhibit and be included in the permanent collection of the Istanbul Modern Museum.

His works have been shown in over 30 exhibitions in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Venice, Sydney, Amman, London, Shanghai, Dubai, New York, Chicago and Istanbul. He currently lives and works between New York and Istanbul.

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PRESENT EDITION/ ARTISTS & NOMINATORS KHALID ALBAIH (NOMINATED BY STEPHEN STAPLETON) HERA BÜYÜKTAŞÇIYAN (NOMINATED BY ANLAM DE COSTER) ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU (NOMINATED BY ANLAM DE COSTER) BADY DALLOUL (NOMINATED BY LINE AJAN) SOHA ELSIRGANY (NOMINATED BY HUDA LUFTI) DIANA AL HALABI (NOMINATED BY SULTAN SOOUD AL QASSEMI) AHMED MATER (NOMINATED BY STEPHEN STAPLETON) LARA NASSER (NOMINATED BY NATHALIE ACKAWI ) RUBA SLAMEH (NOMINATED BY SULTAN SOOUD AL QASSEMI) HAMMZAT TAHABSIM (NOMINATED BY NOURA AL KHASAWNEH) BASSEM YOUSRI (NOMINATED BY LARA BALADI) YAZAN ZUBI (NOMINATED BY NOURA AL KHASAWNEH)

PRESENT EDITION NOMINATED BY: STEPHEN STAPLETON KHALID ALBAIH Kaepernick (Power), 2019 6 color silkscreen printed by Brand X Editions 45 x 34 in 114.3 x 86.4 cm Edition of 55 + 5 AP

NOMINATED BY: ANLAM DE COSTER HERA BÜYÜKTAŞÇIYAN Infinite Traces, 2020

Collage with marble mosaic on archival print 16.5 x 12.6 in (each) 42 x 32 cm (each) 16.5 x 37.8 in (total) 42 x 96 cm (total)

NOMINATED BY: ANLAM DE COSTER ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU Red/Red [Untitled], 2015

Mixed technique on altered paper with Armenian cochineal ink and Turkish red 27.5 x 39.4 in 70 x 100 cm Edition 49 of 50

NOMINATED BY: LINE AJAN BADY DALLOUL

Oman Document : Video from the Realm of Land and Sea, and the twelve thousand papers, 1969 - 2018 Video, color and sound 2 minutes 30 seconds Edition 2 of 5

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PRESENT EDITION

NOMINATED BY: HUDA LUTFI SOHA ELSIRGANY Lungs on The Fourth, 2019 Cyanotype on paper 11.8 x 7.9 in 30 x 21cm Edition 1 of 2

NOMINATED BY: HUDA LUTFI SOHA ELSIRGANY AREA 138, 2019

Collage on paper 7.8 x 11.8 in 20 x 30 cm

NOMINATED BY: SULTAN SOOUD AL QASSEMI DIANA AL HALABI Your First Protest Was A Cry, Keep Crying, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 13.38 x 12.59 in 34 x 32 cm

NOMINATED BY: STEPHEN STAPLETON AHMED MATER Evolution of Man, 2010 5 silk-screen prints, printed with 11 colors on 400gsm Sumerset Tub paper 31.5 x 23.6 in (each) 80 x 60 cm (each) Edition of 100

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PRESENT EDITION NOMINATED BY: NATHALIE ACKAWI LARA NASSER Bad News, 2019 Oil on canvas 30 x 36 in 76.2 x 91.4 cm

NOMINATED BY: SULTAN SOOUD AL QASSEMI RUBA SALAMEH Twins, 2020

Acrylic on linen 30.7 x 36.8 in 78 x 93.5 cm

NOMINATED BY: SULTAN SOOUD AL QASSEMI RUBA SALAMEH Diner, 2020

Acrylic on linen 30.7 x 17.7 in 78 x 45 cm

NOMINATED BY: NOURA AL KHASAWNEH HAMMZAT TAHABSIM Head of Woman, 2021

Graphite and pastel on wool 21.7 x 31.5 in 55 x 80 cm

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PRESENT EDITION

NOMINATED BY: LARA BALADI BASSEM YOUSRI Nothing (part of RGB1 installation), 2014 Acrylic Ink and paint on canvas 11.8 x 9.8 in 30 × 25 cm

NOMINATED BY: LARA BALADI BASSEM YOUSRI What the Fuck! (part of RGB1 installation), 2014 Acrylic Ink and paint on canvas 12.2 x 13.8 in 31 × 35 cm

NOMINATED BY: NOURA AL KHASAWNEH YAZAN EL ZUBI Alexander, 2020

Inkjet on matte archival paper 27.6 x 18.5 in 70 x 47 cm Edition 2 of 15 + 1 AP

NOMINATED BY: NOURA AL KHASAWNEH YAZAN EL ZUBI Old Boy in Heliopolis, 2015

Inkjet on matte archival paper 18.5 x 27.6 in 47 x 70 cm Edition 2 of 15 + 1 AP

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PRESENT EDITION

NOMINATED BY: NOURA AL KHASAWNEH YAZAN EL ZUBI Etoile, North Coast, 2021

Inkjet on matte archival paper 27.6 x 19.7 in 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 15 + 1 AP

NOMINATED BY: NOURA AL KHASAWNEH YAZAN EL ZUBI Water Lilies at Giza Zoo, 2021

Inkjet on matte archival paper 27.6 x 19.7 in 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 15 + 1 AP

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PRESENT EDITION

KHALID ALBAIH Kaepernick (Power), 2019 6 color silkscreen printed by Brand X Editions 45 x 34 in 114.3 x 86.4 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Khalid Albaih is a Romanian born, Qatar raised, awardwinning Sudanese artist, political cartoonist, cultural producer, and consultant based between Doha and Copenhagen. Albaih is on the board of several global art and media initiatives.

Nominated by Stephen Stapleton, Founding Director, CULTURUNNERS & Edge of Arabia

Besides his two books, KHARTOON! and Sudan Retold on the shelves of international bookshops, Khalid’s political cartoons and political commentary on current affairs have been published in various established media outlets, publications, and books. Khalid was named #4 on the list of the best cartoonists in the world by The Independent in 2017.

As well as being the inaugural Soros Art Fellow and the Artist’s At Risk inaugural Freedom Fellow, Khalid is the founder of award-winning space sharing platform getfadaa.com; sudanartanddesignlibrary.com; SudanArtistFund.com; and @DohaFashionFridays.

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PRESENT EDITION

HERA BÜYÜKTAŞÇIYAN Infinite Traces, 2020

Collage with marble mosaic on archival print 16.5 x 12.6 in (each) 42 x 32 cm (each) 16.5 x 37.8 in (total) 42 x 96 cm (total)

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Hera Büyüktaşcıyan integrates metaphors from local myths and historic and iconographic elements of different geographies to open up new narrative scopes. She locates the figure of the Other between the twinned spectres of absence and invisibility in order to weave connections between identity, memory, space and time.

Büyüktaşcıyan was born in Istanbul in 1984, and graduated from Marmara University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Painting department in 2006. She lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.

ARTIST STATEMENT Infinite Traces, is a collage series in relation to Hera Büyüktaşcıyan’s film titled ‘’Infinite Nectar’’ (2019). In this piece, Büyüktaşcıyan traversed many sites in Lahore (Pakistan) by tracing Post-Partition reflections, the ontology of space, borders and invisible traces. The piece has come to life as a part of an ongoing series and research of the artist between the Indian Punjab and Pakistani Punjab since 2016 where she started tracing (Sikh) buildings abandoned in the aftermath of 1947 Partition.

Nominated by Anlam de Coster, Independent Curator and Global Strategic Partnerships Lead, Artsy

These spaces bear witness to the invisible and hidden layers of history carrying an aquatic memory of livelihoods and violent erasures. These layers resurface with the tidal movement of time resonating with the current flows and events, recalling and mirroring the past into the present.

The work moves along the axes of the imaginary and the terrestrial through architectural memory and fragments that enables a consistent movement between the past and the present. Each piece meanders between the social and cultural memory of spaces addressing its connection to power and violence. Focusing on the layered and conflicted history of Punjab, the artist has explored how the reconfiguration of territories impacted national and social realms.

Infinite Traces, derives from the poetics of space of these sites, resistant to the dynamics of power and transformation throughout history. It reflects upon the cyclical movement of time, memory and human presence in these spatial palimpsests.

The piece refers to the sense of infinity along the axes of representation of memory by creating a series of mirrorings that reflect upon the lost and found elements of spaces that has become the embodiment of the invisible . By attempting to trace the invisible, the work reflects upon the notion of drawing time through various layers and elements of history and a reading of topographic memory.

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PRESENT EDITION

ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU

Red/Red [Untitled], 2015 Mixed technique on altered paper with Armenian cochineal ink and Turkish red 27.5 x 39.4 in 70 x 100 cm Edition 49 of 50

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Aslı Çavuşoğlu (1982, Istanbul) examines the way in which cultural and historical facts are transformed, represented, and interpreted by individuals. Working across various media, Çavuşoğlu often assumes the role of an interpreter, writer or facilitator in her projects in order to highlight the precarious and subjective nature of our shared histories.

Recent solo shows include Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange, Kadist, Paris (2020); The Place of Stone, New Museum, New York (2018); Red / Red, MATHAF Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar (2016); Murder in Three Acts, Delfina Foundation, London (2013)

ARTIST STATEMENT Red/Red narrates the story of and through one color— red. The red used in the project is a specific pigment traditionally made from an insect known as “Ararat”

Nominated by Anlam de Coster, Independent Curator and Global Strategic Partnerships Lead, Artsy

or “Armenian Cochineal”, indigenous to the Ararat Plain.

Red / Red proposes a model of co-existence for inhabitants of this contested geographic region through an ecosystem that fosters the production of this special color.

Armenian cochineal is an insect that lives in the roots of the Aeluropus littoralis plant that grows on the banks of the Aras River, which marks the natural border between Turkey and Armenia. The carminic acid found in the Armenian cochineal enables the production of a special red that has been known back to the 7th century BC. Aeluropus littoralis and Armenian cochineal have been categorized as endangered species since the industrialization in 1970s’ USSR Armenia. On the Turkish side, there is no threat to the growing areas of the plant and the insect, but the knowledge of producing the red color is lacking since 1915.

Armen Sahakyan, a phytotherapist and senior researcher at the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts in Yerevan is probably the only person who can still extract this red based on the recipes from the 14th century Armenian manuscripts. The drawings have been created with the 12 gr of Armenian cochineal ink given to the artist

by Sahakyan.

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PRESENT EDITION

BADY DALLOUL

Oman Document : Video from the Realm of Land and Sea, and the twelve thousand papers, 1969 - 2018 Video, color and sound 2 minutes 30 seconds Edition 2 of 5

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY A French-Syrian artist born in Paris in 1986, Bady Dalloul graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2015 and was granted high honors from the jury. The political, sociological and historical dimension of multiple histories intersect and are at the heart of his practice. Through drawing, video and objects, Bady Dalloul creates a dialogue between the imaginary and the real by questioning even the logic of writing history.

His works are part of the permanent collections of the MnamCentre Pompidou, the Mac/Val - Musée d’art contemporain du Val de Marne, the Frac d’Ile-de-France Le Plateau, the Institut du Monde Arabe and the Kadist Art Foundation. In 2017, he received the prize for Arab Contemporary Creation from the Friends of the Institut du Monde Arabe. His work will also be the subject of a forthcoming exhibition with the collections of the BNF - National Library of France at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Nominated by Line Ajan, curator and art historian

“Anchored in various forms of writing, Bady Dalloul’s practice involves the creation of imaginary countries and contexts. The multiple elements weaved together in these stories, however, are reminiscent of actual territories and events. By constantly blurring the limits between the fictitious and (what is presumed to be) real, his delicate drawings, playful artist books and craftily-montaged videos question the truth-value of documents and of History as a monophonic discipline. Comprised of found footage from the late 1960s, Oman document shows military operations in the desert of the Sultanate of Oman, which likely took place during the Dhofar rebellion. These images, which evoke a period of violence, are interspersed with mundane scenes of bread-baking, in a sort of ode to informal histories. The glitches that punctuate the video echo the uncertainty of History: in Dalloul’s work, « time is falsified » (quote from the artist), while History stumbles and often falls.”—Line Ajan

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PRESENT EDITION

SOHA ELSIRGANY

Lungs on the Fourth, 2019 Cyanotype on paper 11.8 x 7.9 in 30 x 21 cm Edition 1 of 2

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Soha Elsirgany is an Egyptian multimedia artist and arts writer. She graduated with a major in Art from the American University in Cairo, 2011. Her works were displayed in several group exhibitions in Egypt, London, Finland and Germany, and she earned the Youth Salon Video Prize at the 25th Youth Salon in Cairo for her stopmotion video ‘Ficus Sycomorus’. As a culture journalist, her work was published in Ahram Online, Community Times, as well as Marriott Traveler.

In 2018 she founded Artlit Studio, a writing service that helps artists present their work in text professionally.

In her early collage animations, she explored parallels between personal events and the shifts in her society and surroundings. Her work has since developed its autobiographical aspect, merging real and fictional narratives to explore the effect of emotional experiences on the physicality of the human body.

Nominated by Huda Lutfi, Visual artist —Line Ajan

“ In September 2019, I was pleasantly

surprised to see Soha’s artwork at Soma gallery, and to realize that she is a serious artist in her own right. Her collage works moved me because they reveal an originality of spirit, they are sincere, strong and fresh.

„

--Huda Lutfi

In her early collage animations, she explored parallels between personal events and the shifts in her society and surroundings. Her work has since developed its autobiographical aspect, merging real and fictional narratives to explore the effect of emotional experiences on the physicality of the human body. Most recently her work involves paper collage, text, and experimental photography to present stories where scientific representation of the body as a landscape is mixed with subjective processes of self-healing and self-destruction.

Across the different mediums her works are attempts to capture connections and parallels that were transient, but have left a long standing impact.

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PRESENT EDITION

SOHA ELSIRGANY AREA 138, 2019

Collage on paper 7.8 x 11.8 in 20 x 30 cm

“I have known Soha Elsirgany as one of the few arts journalists who writes intelligently on the art and cultural scene in Cairo. Even though we met a number of times to talk about my work, she did not mention that she was also a practicing artist. In September 2019, I was pleasantly surprised to see Soha’s artwork at Soma gallery, and to realize that she is a serious artist in her own right. Her collage works moved me because they reveal an originality of spirit, they are sincere, strong and fresh. Beyond the text and imagery that she evokes, Soha’s work has an invisible depth that draws the viewer to ponder over the visual and textual constructions that she makes. Choosing to present Soha’s work to public view allows it some of the attention it deserves.

Nominated by Huda Lutfi, Visual artist

Trained as a visual artist, Soha initially experimented with different art forms, such as animation, photography and installation. More recently, she turned to mixed media collages that revolve around stories examining scientific representation of the body as a cityscape.

Thanks to her profession as art critic and writer, Soha is able to talk insightfully about the relationship between her own experience and the art she makes: The Atlas, she explains, charts some of the ways emotions and internal dialogue have intruded on bodily functions. It considers the influence of memory and regards it as an unreliable narrator of the internal dialogue – a shapeless presence physically changing the city. Some areas harbor more darkness, some are overdeveloped – it’s a city shaped by a delicate effort to balance opposites; lenience with tension, receiving and contributing, embracing and resisting.” -- Huda Lutfi

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PRESENT EDITION

DIANA AL HALABI

Your First Protest Was A Cry, Keep Crying, 2021 Acrylic on canvas 13.38 x 12.59 in 34 x 32 cm

Nominated by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Founder, Barjeel Art Foundation

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Diana Al Halabi is a Lebanese interdisciplinary artist, who works mainly with painting. Through her feminist autoethnographic research, she links the oppression of the patriarch in the nuclear family to the oppression of the state. she deems it necessary to work around the notion of class within the nuclear family unit itself. Her recent projects illustrate the disciplinary apparatuses chosen when the Paternal authority is fascinated by dictatorship. In 2017, she was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan’s homework space program, where she worked extensively on the subject of naming and its path from natality into obituary papers.

In 2019, she moved to The Netherlands to do her Masters in fine arts at the Piet Zwart Institute.

As the disciplinary phase of upbringing starts at home and ranges to up to eighteen years after birth, childhood, which according to Shulamith Firestone is segregated from the rest of society by economic dependence of children and disciplinary institutions such as the school, is where children are almost treated as asexual angels.

I would argue that in a society such as the Lebanese, where the political buzzing sound is inevitable and compulsory, and the perception of it is not a choice but rather an urgency, then childhood is most likely to be exposed naked to the wildness of the “events” that rules the reality of the rest of the society.

If a child in a family can be a synonym of the working class in society, given that decisions and disciplinary settings are passed down onto him, then one can say that a cry is one’s first protest. In this work, I attempted to touch upon the scarcity, the protest, and the patriarchal manipulation that cycles back and forth in a class struggle.

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PRESENT EDITION

AHMED MATER Evolution of Man, 2010 5 silk-screen prints, printed with 11 colors on 400gsm sumerset tub paper 31.5 x 23.6 in (each) 80 x 60 cm (each) Edition of 100

Nominated by Stephen Stapleton, Founding Director, CULTURUNNERS & Edge of Arabia

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Ahmed Mater trained as a doctor on the Saudi/Yemeni border. He uses photography, film, sculpture, and performance to map, document, and analyze rapid developments in Saudi Arabia, considering their psychological and health impact on the individual, the community, and society at large. Entwining expressive and politically engaged artistic aims with the scientific objectives of his medical training, his artistic practice embraces the paradoxes of science and faith.

A silhouetted gas pump mutates into a human x-ray, a gun to its head, before morphing back again. Unlike the progression of evolution, this foreboding form is caught in a relentless and destructive cycle without reprieve.

Here a succinct, urgent warning against an over-reliance on the petrodollar, a destructive addiction Mater witnessed in Saudi Arabia as it embraced and feted its fortune as a rentier state.

By employing broad research-based techniques, Mater mines and preserves forgotten narratives and unofficial histories to map the Kingdom’s past, present, and future.

Mater’s work is part of major international collections, including The British Museum, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Mater lives and works in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He is represented by Athr Gallery, Jeddah and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.

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PRESENT EDITION

Nominated by Nathalie Ackawi, Partner and Co-Director, Beirut Art Residency

“Lara Nasser’s multidisciplinary practice LARA NASSER Bad News, 2019 Oil on canvas 30 x 36 in 76.2 x 91.44 cm

has an audacious quality which never fails to amaze the viewer. Moving freely between painting, sculpture, and film, the artist blends in every single creation a masterful exploitation of popular narratives and personal fantasies with humor and ingenuity, at once crude, unsettling, and culturally charged

„

--Nathalie Ackawi

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Lara Nasser is a multidisciplinary artist from Lebanon.

Nasser completed an MFA at the Pratt Institute in 2015.

Since then, Nasser’s international exhibitions have included the Beirut Contemporary Art Fair; Pierogi Boiler Room, Brooklyn; Galerie Nikki Diana Marquardt, Paris; Takt Kunstprojecteraum, Berlin; H Gallery, Los Angeles; Theodore: Art, New York; and the Condo Art Fair 2019 at The Breeder Gallery Athens; among many others.

Nasser’s work employs sculpture, video, and painting to dissect the controlled production of identity and behavior.

More specifically, she is interested in failure within frameworks meant to provide stability.

Her work is included in the collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, and the Imago Mundi collection of Luciano Benetton. In 2018, she had her first solo show at Meredith Rosen Gallery, NY and had a second solo with the gallery in October of 2020. Nasser lives and works in Brooklyn.

From the macro-level of political conflict to her own personal insecurities, she recreates predicaments in which established social and political scripts no longer apply. Chaos competes with structure in absurd imagery, performances, assemblages, and interactive works that implicate the viewer as a participant in an uncanny reality.

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PRESENT EDITION

RUBA SALAMEH Twins, 2020

Acrylic on linen 30.7 x 36.8 in 78 x 93.5 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY 1985.Visual artist born in Nazareth / Palestine. She obtained both B.A (2006-10) and M.F.A in Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem (20122014). Her work varies from painting to video, photography and installations. Through her work she questions notions of land, geographies, displacement. She worked as a lecturer in the History of Art painting and practical classical painting at the Arab College in Haifa and conducted short term workshops at Bezalel academy.

Nominated by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Founder, Barjeel Art Foundation

Together with curator Fadwa Naamna she has worked on a research film about the Palestinian cultural scene that appeared in Haifa in the last two years, its complex relation to self-organization / autonomy and how it is operating within the constantly changing environment. Ruba currently is focusing on painting and has a solo exhibition Tensegrity at Zawyeh Gallery Dubai.

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PRESENT EDITION

RUBA SALAMEH Diner, 2020

Acrylic on linen 30.7 x 17.7 in 78 x 45 cm

ARTIST STATEMENT Through my work, I always seek to find connections between the westernized art influences I received through my education and my personal herstory. I see my work as an act of projection in psychological terms through which I create and deconstruct the worlds I want to see by using painting, photography, video, and other mediums.

Nominated by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Founder, Barjeel Art Foundation

In my recent work, my focus was mainly on the painting.

The harmonious shapes and colors created are disrupted suddenly by hordes of small chaotic ants crawling on the surface of the canvas, metaphorically presenting the ants as a living organism, whose direct connection to the land is an inherent part of their existence.

Likewise, Palestinians as a farmer nation always had an intimate relationship to the land. The collection is a parallel to my personal interpretation of my identity as a Palestinian, which allows me to reconnect to my own herstory through the construction of a new body including the political reality.

The ants’ indigenous existence amongst a group of geometrical shapes in an artwork can be seen as a form of resistance as their presence transcends being part of the aesthetics and brings attention to these creatures’ pervasive organic ubiquity. Slowly, the indigenous population’s daily motions transform into a form of disruption to the supremacy of the dominant power, simply by the fact they continue to exist.

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PRESENT EDITION

HAMMZAT TAHABSIM Head of Woman, 2021

Graphite and pastel on wool 21.7 x 31.5 in 55 x 80 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Hammzat Tahabsim (B.1997, Amman) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist. His work explores various themes by means of experimenting with the cross-pollination of tactile areas of the arts and the human environment. His paintings have a chimerical arrangement to their subject matter, with figural compositions placed within depictions of changing ecology.

The bases of his paintings are textural materials like heavy wool and wood. Waxy pastel mark-work is layered on top of soft graphite under-drawings. His portraits have a familial emanation and are painted with a gestural attitude to proportion and anatomy. Hammzat Tahabsim is currently artist in residence at MMAG foundation in Amman, where he is producing his work.

Nominated by Noura Al Khasawneh, Director, MMAG Foundation and Co-Founder, Spring Sessions

“The representational style of Hammzat Tahabsim’s domestic themed paintings is multilayered.

His portraits on wool reflect qualities of draft and paintwork combined with the sensuous characteristics of physical materials, ultimately creating a sense of warm visceral tactility.”

--Noura Al Khasawneh

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PRESENT EDITION

BASSEM YOUSRI Nothing (part of RGB1 installation), 2014 Acrylic ink and paint on canvas 11.8 x 10 in 30 x 25 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Egyptian, born in Algeria in 1980. Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt Bassem Yousri is a visual artist, filmmaker, and art educator. Within his multidisciplinary practice, he works with a variety of forms that include mixedmedia installations in art galleries and public spaces, and experimental and documentary films. Yousri relies on humor and sarcasm as a tool that can reach different audiences from diverse cultures, which allows him to criticize common stereotypes and taboos.

While his work is often a commentary on the contemporary Egyptian socio-political situation, what concerns him as an artist goes beyond the limits of that to extend to people and happenings he connects with in different geographical and cultural contexts.

Nominated by Lara Baladi, Visual artist

“ This is how I remember meeting

Bassem, in the midst of the Egyptian revolution: a genuine, fine young man who was then already one of the most influential artists of a new generation of creative doers emerging in Tahrir.„ --Lara Baladi

Moreover, Yousri’s work investigates issues related to the relationship between form and representation in the context of the exhibition space and public space. Yousri’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally.

Some of the venues that featured his work include the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York, USA; Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; Mathaf: the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar; l’Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, France; the State Museum of Egyptian Art in Munich, Germany; and IVAM (Institut Valencià d’Art Modern) in Valencia; Spain.Yousri received his MFA in painting, drawing and sculpture from Tyler School of Art – Temple University in Philadelphia in 2009, and his BFA in painting from the School of Fine Arts – Helwan University in Cairo in 2003. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Arts Grant in 2006, and an AFAC grant in 2012.

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PRESENT EDITION

BASSEM YOUSRI What the Fuck! (part of RGB1 installation), 2014 Acrylic ink and paint on canvas 12.2 x 13.7 in 31 x 35 cm

Nominated by Lara Baladi, Visual artist

ARTIST STATEMENT RGB1 SERIES: This installation represents what could be perceived as a vast non-linear storyboard or graphic novel. The “narrative” results from a random arrangement of small instances, taken out of their context and inspired by life events at times, and at other times are entirely fictional.

The scenes portrayed on the canvases introduce a commentary on society, politics, and religious taboos in a light-hearted and sarcastic way

“‘Don’t harass me!’ ‘Don’t Blindfold me! ‘Don’t militarize me!’ Spread a Word campaign! Anyone who closely followed the 2011 Egyptian uprising remembers this extraordinary campaign, which covered the streets of Cairo in the form of stickers, posters and T-shirts. Following the events in Tahrir Square, Bassem Yousri launched a call on Facebook against all forms of violence. The virtual visitors of the page suggested slogans which were then printed and distributed in Tahrir and beyond. This is how I remember meeting Bassem, in the midst of the Egyptian revolution: a genuine, fine young man who was then already one of the most influential artists of a new generation of creative doers emerging in Tahrir.” -- Lara Baladi

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PRESENT EDITION

YAZAN EL ZUBI

YAZAN EL ZUBI

Inkjet on matte archival paper 27.6 x 18.5 in 70 x 47 cm Edition 2 of 15 + 1 AP

Inkjet on matte archival paper 18.5 x 27.6 in 47 x 70 cm Edition 2 of 15 + 1 AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Nominated by Noura Al Khasawneh, Director, MMAG Foundation and Co-Founder, Spring Sessions

Alexander, 2020

Yazan El-Zubi is a visual artist, image maker and DJ based in Cairo; his photographic practice focuses on juxtapositions between locations and objects. His most recent photographic series: A Call for a Sensitive Ranger was exhibited with Gypsum Gallery at ARCO feria in Madrid 2020, curated by Ovul O. Durmusoglu and Tiago Deap.

In 2019, he participated in the “Acts of Simulation’’ residency led by artist Shuruq Harb and facilitated by the MMAG foundation in Amman, Jordan.

El Zubi’s work will be featured in an online video screening for Art Viewer, curated by Tiago Deap, and will be included in a photo collection for Gypsum Gallery’s online showroom curated by Sara El Adl & Aleya Hamza. As a DJ, his latest live set was a performance for the 2020 Nyege Nyege Festival curated by Nadah Shazly in Dahsur, Egypt.

Old Boy in Heliopolis, 2015

“Yazan Zubi’s work explores relics from past civilizations. His images capture the juxtaposition of grouped objects and create the possibility to witness history against the present. He works with clusters of cross-temporal objects as empty shells of time; porous vestiges that transform according to the

emotional and physical variables of their surrounding.” --Noura Al Khasawneh

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PRESENT EDITION

Nominated by Noura Al Khasawneh, Director, MMAG Foundation and Co-Founder, Spring Sessions

YAZAN EL ZUBI

YAZAN EL ZUBI

Inkjet on matte archival paper 27.5 x 19.7 in 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 15 + 1 AP

Inkjet on matte archival paper 27.6 x 19.7 in 70 x 50 cm Edition 1 of 15 + 1 AP

Etoile, North Coast, 2021

Water Lilies at Giza Zoo, 2021

ARTIST STATEMENT: In his digital and analogue photography, Yazan El Zubi documents accumulative eras of urban memory, popular culture, botanics and mythology juxtaposed against the present. His work atmospherically captures vivid and derelicte apparitions in flux. Using an absurdist lens, he creates play between his subject matter and its emotional and physical value as perceived by the viewer.

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FUTURE EDITION/ ARTISTS SAKS AFRIDI YUSEF ALAHMAD ELEANA ANTONAKI LARA ATALLAH RAFRAM CHADDAD YASMINE NASSER DIAZ LAILA TARA H SAMAR HEJAZI SARA ISSAKHARIAN HIBA KALACHE LAITH MAJALI ORLEE MALKA BIBI MANAVI REHAN MISKCI SARA OUHADDOU SARA RAHMANIAN ALYMAMAH RASHED ZEINAB SAAB PEYMAN SHAFIEEZADEH SHABNAM YOUSEFIAN SOFIA ZUBI

FUTURE EDITION

SAKS AFRIDI

Tribal Circuits, 2021 Lenticular print 37 x 25 in 94 x 63.5 cm Edition 1 of 3

YUSEF ALAHMAD Non-sense, 2014

Screen print on archival paper 19.5 x 19.5 in 49.5 x 49.5 cm Edition 6 of 8

YUSEF ALAHMAD Phantasma, 2014

Screen print on archival paper 13 x 12.75 in 33 x 32.4 cm Edition 22 of 29

YUSEF ALAHMAD Abstract, 2016

Screen print on archival paper 27 x 22 in 68.6 x 55.9 cm Edition 8 of 12

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FUTURE EDITION

YUSEF ALAHMAD Lam, 2020

Screen print on archival paper 42 x 30 in 106.7 x 76.2 cm Edition 20 of 22

ELEANA ANTONAKI

Uncanny Gardening I, 2016 Graphite, gesso and resin on a wood panel 30 x 24 in 76.2 x 60.96 cm

ELEANA ANTONAKI

Uncanny Gardening I, 2016 Graphite, gesso and resin on a wood panel 30 x 24 in 76.2 x 60.96 cm

LARA ATALLAH

The Abandoned Dinner Party (coffee time), 2014 Giclée print 30 x 40 in 76.2 x 101.6 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

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FUTURE EDITION

LARA ATALLAH

Unititled (Milos #1), 2017 Polaroid print 4.25 x 3.5 in 10.8 x 8.9 cm

RAFRAM CHADDAD Watch Rug, 2013 Mix media 80.7 x 29.5 in 205 x 75 cm

YASMINE NASSER DIAZ I got to do things my own way, darling (from Rihanna), 2016 Collage 14 x 17 in 35.5 x 43.2 cm

LAILA TARA H

That’s all folks!, 2020 Natural pigment (inc. genuine Lapis Lazuli, Malachite, Cinnabar), watercolor, 24k raised gold, pencil on handmade recycled Indian hemp paper 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm

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FUTURE EDITION

SAMAR HEJAZI

Monochrome W&B, 2017 Cotton thread and cotton fabric 11.4 x 8.5 in 29 x 21.6 cm

SARA ISSAKHARIAN Namus, 2020

Acrylic, charcoal, oil, pastel on paper 51.2 x 66.9 in 130 x 170 cm

HIBA KALACHE

Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality, 2020 Mixed media on paper 29.9 x 22 in 76 x 56 cm

LAITH MAJALI

Western Tourists in Giza, Egypt, 2019 Giclee print on canson platine fiber Rag paper 310gsm 17 x 22 in 43.18 x 55.9 cm Edition 1 of 10 + 2AP

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FUTURE EDITION

LAITH MAJALI

Arab tourists in Giza, Egypt, 2019 Giclee print on canson platine fiber Rag paper 310gsm 17 x 22 in 43.18 x 55.9 cm Edition 1 of 10 + 2AP

ORLEE MALKA

Self portrait as Schluchit Girl, 2018 Intaglio print on cotton paper 11 x 9 in 28 x 22.8 cm AP, Edition of 12 + AP

BIBI MANAVI

Formation Measure IV, 2018 Pigment print on cotton paper 39.4 x 59.1 in 100 x 150 cm Edition 2 of 8 + 2 AP

REHAN MISKCI Null Subject I, 2016

Archival pigment print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

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FUTURE EDITION REHAN MISKCI New Error, 2019

Archival pigment print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

SARA OUHADDOU

Impression//Impression.Vert #1, 2017 Ceramic and glaze from Tamegroute, Southern Morocco 7.87 x 7.87 in 20 x 20 cm

SARA OUHADDOU

Impression//Impression.Vert #2, 2017 Ceramic and glaze from Tamegroute, Southern Morocco 7.87 x 7.87 in 20 x 20 cm

SARA RAHMANIAN Tehran Subway, 2020

Acrylic on canvas board 24 x 18 in 61 x 45.7 cm

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FUTURE EDITION

ALYMAMAH RASHED

The Lover’s Food Is Not Within You, 2020 Watercolor and collage on paper 14.5 x 18 in 36.8 x 45.7 cm

ALYMAMAH RASHED

Your Body Is Away From You (Sujood), 2020 Graphite on paper 16 x 23 in 40.6 x 58.4 cm

ZEINAB SAAB

Translate Beit, 2018 Silkscreen artist book 4.25 x 11 in (closed) 4.25 x 22 in (open) 10.8 x 27.9 cm (closed) 10.8 x 55.88 cm (open)

ZEINAB SAAB

Small Reminders, 2017 Silkscreen artist book 3 x 4.5 in (closed) 3 x 72 in (open) 7.6 x 11.4 cm (closed) 7.6 x 182.88 cm (open)

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FUTURE EDITION

PEYMAN SHAFIEEZADEH

Untitled 1 (from Recycle series), 2020 Mixed media on paper 33.9 x 26.8 in 86 x 68 cm

PEYMAN SHAFIEEZADEH

Untitled 2 (from Recycle series), 2020 Mixed media on paper 27.2 x 21.7 in 69 x 55 cm

SHABNAM YOUSEFIAN Untitled, 2019

Oil on canvas 36 x 48 in 91.4 x 129.9 cm

SOFIA ZUBI

Sheild of Music (Diptych), 2020 Acrylic on paper 30 x 22 in (each) 76.2 x 55.9 cm (each)

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FUTURE EDITION

SOFIA ZUBI

Building the Courage to Face the Moon, 2018 Gouache on canvas board 8 x 8 in 20.3 x 20.3 cm

SOFIA ZUBI

Fear of the Unknown, 2017 Gouache on canvas board 8 x 8 in 20.32 x 20.32 cm

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FUTURE EDITION

SAKS AFRIDI

Tribal Circuits, 2021 Lenticular print 37 x 25 in 94 x 63.5 cm Edition 1 of 3

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Saks Afridi is a Pakistani-American multi-disciplinary artist.

His art practice investigates the predicaments and perplexities of the life of an ‘Insider Outsider.’ This is the practice of achieving a sense of belonging while being out of place, finding happiness in a state of temporary permanence, and re-contextualizing existing historical and cultural narratives with the contemporary.

He speaks English, Urdu, Pashto and conversational Arabic.

He is the proud recipient of 2 Gold Cannes Lion Awards and a United Nations Award for Peace & Understanding. Saks comes to art with a background as a Creative Director in advertising. He studied advertising at the Academy of Art and sculpture at the Art Students League of New York.

He does this through a new genre he terms as ‘Sci-fi Sufism’, where he fuses mysticism and futurism to discover worlds and galaxies within the self.

Tribal Circuits is a lenticular print of a traditional tribal Persian rug that partially veils and unveils a world of circuitry and future technology hidden underneath. This veiling and unveiling attempts to connect the past with the future, the seen with the unseen, and the machine with the hand.

ARTIST STATEMENT

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FUTURE EDITION

YUSEF ALAHMAD Nonsense, 2014

Screen print on archival paper 19.5 x 19.5 in 49.5 x 49.5 cm Edition 6 of 8

YUSEF ALAHMAD Phantasma, 2016

Screen print on archival paper 13 x 12.75 in 33 x 32.4 cm Edition 22 of 29

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Yusef Alahmad is a graphic designer and artist based in Washington, DC. He completed his MFA degree in graphic design at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco in December 2016, and his thesis explored ‘Graphic Design Standards and intellectual property rights in Saudi Arabia’.

He is currently an independent designer, alternating between graphic design projects and art commissions. In 2017, he was the inaugural artist resident at the King Abdulaziz Center for Culture (Ithra)’s Majlis residency program in New York City. His work has been exhibited at numerous institutions worldwide including: the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, MI; the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (UMOCA) in Salt Lake City, UT; the Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM) in Memphis, TN; the MISK Global Forum in Riyadh; Saudi Arabia; and at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, UAE.

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FUTURE EDITION

YUSEF ALAHMAD

YUSEF ALAHMAD

Abstract, 2016

Lam, 2020

Screen print on archival paper 27 x 22 in 68.6 x 55.9 cm Edition 8 of 12

Screen print on archival paper 42 x 30 in 106.7 x 76.2 cm Edition 20 of 22

ARTIST STATEMENT Yusef Alahmad engages in a vibrant exploration of calligraphic heritage by manipulating Arabic typefaces and imbuing them with traditional Islamic patterns. The dialogue of sensibilities that occurs within the artist’s design choices such as wide gradients of color, bold repetitive lines and digital textures was largely influenced by the artist’s time spent living in San Francisco studying graphic design.

Through the use of repetition, mirroring and altering depth to evoke a sense of motion and energy, he creates a visual constellation of his diverse creative influences. Alahmad believes that visual design is a reflection of societal values and he strives to evoke this in his practice

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FUTURE EDITION

ELEANA ANTONAKI

Uncanny Gardening I, 2016 Graphite, gesso and resin on a wood panel 30 x 24 in 76.2 x 60.96 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Eleana Antonaki is a New York based artist. She holds an MFA from Parsons, The New School and has been a fellow at Ashkal Alwan HWP Program in Beirut and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

She works with a variety of media such as drawing, sculpture, textile and video. Her research revolves around matters of postcolonial and transnational feminism in relation to domestic cultural practices amongst women in the refugee communities in Greece.

Recent exhibitions include We Are Happy To Serve You, Vera List Center, NY, HWP Open Studios, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, LB, Gargening, Mama Gallery, Toronto, CA, Agean, AAA3A Gallery, NY, Cultural Transplants, Shiva Gallery, NY, Lack of Location is My Location, Koenig and Clinton Gallery, NY, Whitney ISP Studio Exhibition, EIizabeth Foundation for the Arts, NY, I Can Because you Do, Participant Inc. She is the recipient of the BP Young Artist Award from the National Portrait Gallery of London and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant for Painters.

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FUTURE EDITION

ELEANA ANTONAKI

Uncanny Gardening I, 2016 Graphite, gesso and resin on a wood panel 30 x 24 in 76.2 x 60.96 cm

ARTIST STATEMENT Uncanny Gardening I is a project that consists of drawings on wood panels that present a collection of fictional objects.

It is named after one of the drawings in the series that depicts the fictional book Uncanny Gardening, A Complete Guide For Planting Yucca Trees, Persian Silk Trees and Bougainvilleas.

The other objects in this project are tightly connected with and are also indexical of specific historical and political moments in Greece, such as the civil war, the years of the dictatorship and the political events after the bankruptcy.

The departure point for this work was my family’s long tradition of planting a Persian Silk Tree every time they relocated to a new place, throughout a series of domestic relocations within Turkey and from Turkey to Greece.

My family’s gardening tradition functions as an indexical marker of the historical events that formed my country’s history and my family’s sense of identity.

I decided to appropriate the way in which planting operates within the historical context, as a strategy to create the work.

Each drawing is a representation of an object that exists as a symptom of a historical condition.

The objects in the drawings do not exist within a real archive nor in a fictional documentation authored by me.

They only exist through the representation of their images and they are constructed in a way in which they function as narrations and comments on different historical moments and conditions.

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FUTURE EDITION

LARA ATALLAH

The Abandoned Dinner Party (coffee time), 2014 Giclée print 30 x 40 in 76.2 x 101.6 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Lara Atallah is a NewYork-based artist and writer. Her practice is informed by her interest in the political nature of landscape, and the power it holds to reshape our perception of borders.

Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, and is part of the Onassis Cultural Foundation’s collection in Athens, as well as the NYU Langone Art Collection.

The piece raises questions about nostalgia and ritual by inserting a table set for Lebanese coffee and traditional ma’amoul pastries into a scene that appears to be taken from Lebanese golden age of the 1960s, but is entirely constructed and collaged from several archival images. This invented landscape comments on the ideas of fabricated stories and faulty mechanisms of memory in a country that does not have an agreed upon history.

Recent exhibitions include the American University Museum, Trestle Gallery, ON CANAL. Her first book, Edge of Elysium, Vol.1 was published by Open Projects Press in September 2019. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Camera Austria, Flash Art Italia, and The Brooklyn Rail among others.

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FUTURE EDITION

LARA ATALLAH

Unititled (Milos #1), 2017 Polaroid print 4.25 x 3.5 in 10.8 x 8.9 cm

34.5531° N, 18.0480° E SERIES 34.5531° N, 18.0480° E is an ongoing project started in 2016 in which the Mediterranean Sea takes center stage. Named after the sea’s coordinates, this body of work consists of Polaroids made along Southern European and West Asian coastlines.

Bordered by over 20 countries, the Mediterranean is commonly perceived as a place of recreation and leisure.

Of late, the sea has become the only viable route to safer shores for the many refugees fleeing war zones aboard hazardous over-packed rubber boats.

In many cases, these boats never make it safely to their destination resulting in dozens of deaths at a time. For those who survive, the Mediterranean represents the stage of a perilous journey.

For many others, it is a final resting place. The medium chosen to photograph these shores is quintessential to the work. Polaroids by definition do not produce photographs over which one has much control.

To photograph the sea with Polaroids means to embrace the unpredictability of the medium, as well as the pictured subject—a large body of water that ebbs and flows beyond the limits of human control.

Each photograph was deliberately damaged during the first 30 seconds of its development producing distorted landscapes. Devoid of any human presence, these photographs depict the sea as a somber place.

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FUTURE EDITION

RAFRAM CHADDAD Watch Rug, 2013 Mix media 80.7 x 29.5 in 205 x 75 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Rafram Chaddad was born in 1976 in Tunisia, where he is currently based. Chaddad is a multidisciplinary artist, often working with sculpture, installation, and video. His practice lies at the intersection of migration, food, sustainability and heritage. He was raised in Jerusalem, and graduated from the Musrara School of Photography and New Media.

In 2010, while working on a photography project in Libya, Rafram was kidnapped by the secret police and spent six months in Abu Salim prison. In 2013, Chaddad published an account of time in prison, titled, “Rafram’s Guide to the Libyan Prison,” with Am Oved Publishing House in Tel Aviv.

Chaddad’s work has been exhibited at venues worldwide, including: Kunst im Tunnel, Dusseldorf; Herzliya Museum, Herzliya; Kayu Lucie Fontaine Gallery, Bali; Lucie Fontaine, Milan; Halle 14, Leipzig; and Zalatimo, Jerusalem.

Chaddad has held solo shows at the Mucem Museum in Marseilles and the Maximilian Forum in Munich. He has received grants from the Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Halle 14, Cittadellarte-Pistoletto Foundation, and received the Bronner stipend from the Goethe Institute. His artwork is part of the private collection of the Bronner family behind the Philara Collection in Dusseldorf, Germany.

ARTIST STATEMENT Watch Rug is a sculpture Rafram Chaddad made from more

than 1200 non-functioning hand watches that his father, a watchmaker, could not fix. The artist made this piece in an attempt to explain his art practice to his father by placing his work for sale similarly to how a rug seller would offer their merchandise.

It represents the tensions and pressures placed upon younger generations of immigrant communities to gain material wealth and achieve success within their newly adopted societies. The piece is furthermore an invitation to reflect on shifting notions of time and our internalized perceptions of space in relation to the passage of time.

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FUTURE EDITION

YASMINE NASSER DIAZ

I got to do things my own way, darling (from Rihanna), 2016 Collage 14 x 17 in 35.5 x 43.2 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Her recent work includes immersive installation, fiber etching, and mixed media collage using personal archives and found imagery.

This collage entitled I got to do things my own way, darling (from Rihanna) is part of a series of works that have come out of a regular collage practice Nasser Diaz began a few years ago. With most of her projects, premeditation and planning are integral.

Diaz is a recipient of the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship with works included in the collections of LACMA, UCLA, and the Arab American National Museum.

She lives and works in Los Angeles. Yasmine is represented

by Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA.

However, collage has helped remind Nasser Diaz how to access an intuitive space — something that she considers to be critical in art making. While these works begin without an intention, she feels the pairings are born out of subconscious processing, much like dreaming does.

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FUTURE EDITION

LAILA TARA H

That’s all folks!, 2020 Natural pigment (inc. genuine Lapis Lazuli, Malachite, Cinnabar), watercolor, 24k raised gold, pencil on handmade recycled Indian hemp paper 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Laila Tara H (b.1995, London) is British-born Iranian artist, based between Tehran and London, specialising in contemporary Indo-Persian miniature painting. Raised across the world, she paints largely autobiographical reflections of a life navigating cultures. Having specialised in Persian and Indian Miniature painting during her Masters at The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, her practice is rooted in traditional methods and materials.

Drawing inspiration from the rich history of miniature painting across the Middle East and South Asia, symbolism seeps through her chosen imagery and into her means of making. All paints are hand-made from (semi-precious) mineral, stone, or plant derived pigments and her paper is natural hemp also hand-made in Jaipur. Respect for the cultural and craft elements of traditional miniature painting are inherent to her practice, as an ode to nature and to the dense history that allows her to practice today. Big empty spaces, small intricately detailed additions, telling stories.

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FUTURE EDITION

SAMAR HEJAZI

Monochrome W&B, 2017 Cotton thread and cotton fabric 11.4 x 8.5 in 29 x 21.6 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Since graduating with a BFA in New Media from Ryerson University in Toronto, Samar Hejazi has attended Arquetopia instructional residencies in Oaxaca, Mexico and Cusco, Peru for which she was awarded a scholarship. She attended the Takt Art Residency in Berlin in 2016, and completed a studio residency at the Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019, which concluded in a group show.

By channeling her Palestinian ancestry through the historical choreography found in craft practices, Samar Hejazi observes the complex conversations between social constructivism, ethnology and the ethos of modernity. These ideas are engaged in an ongoing way through her process and development of diverse materials and forms.

Most recently Samar was invited to take part in the international mentorship program at the Arquetopia Foundation. Samar has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Possum Gallery in Berlin and Decentered Gallery in Puebla, Mexico where she showed works alongside renowned artists such as Ai Wei Wei, Roberto Montenegro and Carlos Arias.

Her monochrome works are a series of small monochrome embroidery pieces that challenge the innate qualities of textile while maintaining the compositional and poetic aspects of an abstract painting.

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FUTURE EDITION

SARA ISSAKHARIAN Namus, 2020

Acrylic, charcoal, oil, pastel on paper 51.2 x 66.9 in 130 x 170 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Sara Issakharian (b. Tehran) completed her MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art in 2015. She was awarded the 2014 inaugural New York Academy of Art Residency in Moscow, Russia and in 2015, she was part of the first-round award winners of the Art Olympia prize, Japan.

Issakharian exhibited her work in Art Basel in 2019. She also is part of many collections in London, Tokyo, Tehran and throughout the United States. In 2021 Issakharian will be exhibiting her work in a solo show at Gregor Podnar Gallery in Berlin.

ARTIST STATEMENT In Sara Issakharian’s paintings, the sometimes traumatic banalities of life are often met with comedic reflex.

Issakharian tries to express precisely these conditions with her multi-layered narrative language of painting and drawing. The characters in her paintings are mostly lost in a space that she likes to call “in between.”

In between refers to a space that we as human beings yearn for. A safe place of stability, freedom and peace.

After moving to America as an immigrant of Iranian Jewish origins, she often feels that there must be a deeper meaning to the place we call home. A meaning that transgresses borders, nationalities and race.

Issakharian often references old master painting, in combination with naïve child-like drawing. Her portrayed figures and/or groups often seem lost in the darkness and light. These visual depictions hope to convey a sense of misplacement belonging to immigrants who left their homes and identities behind in search of new beginnings, or humans lost in the tragedies of their pasts. Her work conveys a space that is constantly in between an experienced past and an unknown future.

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FUTURE EDITION

HIBA KALACHE

Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality, 2020 Mixed media on paper 29.9 x 22 in 76 x 56 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in Beirut, Hiba Kalache is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, sculpture and interactive projects. Kalache draws on her daily life for her materials, process and content. She interrogates the separation between the private and public spheres, and more specifically, what she calls, “the banality of daily rituals.”

Her recent interests include female desire and the abject in relation to truth, and the possibility of positing futurity in an era of perpetual presentism. In her latest project Our Dreams are a Second Life, Kalache shows a ragingly luminescent body of work that extends the themes and gestures of her practice. Produced in a period of protracted sociohistorical and existential crises, this recent work is consonant with the times, even if only obliquely so.

In 2005, Kalache received a Master of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She has since exhibited in Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Istanbul, New Orleans, Oakland, San Jose (USA), San Francisco, Tehran, Athens, London and Paris. Her work has also been shown at art fairs including Art Dubai, Drawing Now (Paris), and Gwangju Art (South Korea).

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FUTURE EDITION

LAITH MAJALI

LAITH MAJALI

Giclee print on canson platine fiber Rag paper 310gsm 17 x 22 in 43.18 x 55.9 cm Edition 1 of 10 + 2AP

Giclee print on canson platine fiber Rag paper 310gsm 17 x 22 in 43.18 x 55.9 cm Edition 1 of 10 + 2AP

Western Tourists in Giza, Egypt, 2019

Arab tourists in Giza, Egypt, 2019

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Laith Al-Majali is a Jordanian film editor, producer and photographer. He produced and edited the Sundance audience award winner Captain Abu Raed (2008) and co-produced the BAFTA recipient and Academy Award nominated Theeb (2016).

For over 15 years Laith has photographed a wide variety of subjects including the rise of Hip-Hop in the Arabic speaking world and diaspora, and more recently working on the story of camels in America. Al-Majali graduated from Elon University in North Carolina, with a degree in Communications in 2005 and currently lives in Los Angeles.

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FUTURE EDITION

ORLEE MALKA

Self portrait as Schluchit Girl, 2018 Intaglio print on cotton paper 11 x 9 in 28 x 22.8 cm AP, Edition of 12 + AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Orlee Malka is an interdisciplinary artist living in New York, who slips off the edges of disciplines of knowledge in an attempt to undo the colonial histories that have produced systems of erasure and loot, specifically since European imperialism.

Self portrait as Schluchit Girl is part of an ongoing series from a meeting point by the well installation called fieldwork to the unconsoled.

Her work considers the collective consciousness of diasporic histories and expands on models of making and planning within cultures of loss. Bearing the study of ethics, she questions universalists assumptions, the subjects they address and those they exclude.

In fieldwork to the unconsoled, 2018- ongoing, she expands on issues of museum restitution and the afterlives of imagined spaces, orientalism, colonialism and the female.

In this piece, I recall the existence of my grandmothers from the middle Atlas who got water from wells with jugs and marked their hands and faces with a visual language of identification and protection.

I think of the well as a meeting place for women from different cultures. What were their ways and practices?

I think about this alongside the collective erasure of their existence, their songs, their aesthetics.

Malka graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University in 2018, and was an inaugural 2018-19 fellow at the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, New York.

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FUTURE EDITION

BIBI MANAVI

Formation Measure IV, 2018 Pigment print on cotton paper 39.4 x 59.1 in 100 x 150 cm Edition 2 of 8 + 2 AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Bibi Manavi is a Paris-based multi-disciplinary artist. Her practice focuses on accessing memory through microscopic observation and archiving of disappearing flora, by means of sculpture and photography. She has exhibited her work throughout France, the U.K. and Italy.

Manavi graduated from Central Saint Martins, London in 2015. In 2016, her research on Persian ornamental techniques led her to undergo an apprenticeship in the traditional craft of Aineh-Kari (mirror mosaics) in Shiraz. She has since participated in various residencies which include: the 100ECS (Etablissement Culturel Solidaire) residency in Paris, 2019; and the Bikini Residency in Lake Como, 2017.

She is set to attend the LabVerde residency program in the Brazilian Amazon in 2021, Covid-19 permitting.

FORMATION MEASURE The Formation Measure series consists of both sculptures and photographs. Manavi’s practice has led her to various sites where she collects plant samples to access the flora’s memory within specific environments. Her research has extended from the highlands of the Alborz and Zagros mountain ranges, to European National reserves and the Amazon basin. Through these expeditions with biologists, she has gathered data which has become the basis of her works. Through a process of microscopic observation and archiving, she produces renderings of the flora’s cellular patterns.By analyzing the tree or plant’s structures through a microscope, she employs a method of encapsulating and reflecting their formation.

Annual rings and cellular compositions taken from specific tree samples are enlarged in varying scales and then recreated in mirror then carved into wood. In other cases, Manavi approaches memory through the magnifying glass of dendrochronology (the scientific method of dating tree rings to the exact year they were formed) in this era of ecological mutation. Manavi’s works are an effort to preserve the memory of trees, under the assumption that if one carves tree rings and delves into its memory, wrinkles, and history, then the possibilities of interpreting the imperceptible materialize. She considers mirror as a lens in which the interior and exterior dissolve into a liminal space. The reflections in her works juxtapose the pastness of the imbued memory with the presentness of its viewing, revealing a festival of cellular connections.

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FUTURE EDITION

REHAN MISKCI Null Subject I, 2016

Archival pigment print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Rehan Miskci (b. 1986, Istanbul) is a NewYork / Istanbul based visual artist working in photography and installation. She holds an undergraduate degree in Interior Architecture from Istanbul Technical University and an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is the first place winner of Baxter Street Camera Club of New York’s Annual Competition (2015).

Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn, Fridman Gallery, New York, Kasa Gallery, Istanbul. Miskci is an alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019) and she is the recipient of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace Fellowship (2019).

Miskci was also awarded a NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship in Photography (2019). She was supported by IKSV (Istanbul Culture and Arts Foundation) to complete a residency at Cité des Arts in Paris, France. (2019)

NULL SUBJECT In linguistic typology, a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an independent clause to lack an explicit subject; such a clause is then said to have a null subject. The series focuses on subjects and objects leaving the frame, turning the familiar into anonymous. The focus is shifted to the peripheries of the frame, where the photograph interacts with the surrounding space.

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FUTURE EDITION

REHAN MISKCI New Error, 2019

Archival pigment print 23.6 x 35.4 in 60 x 90 cm Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP NEW ERROR New Error is a fragment of a photograph of three hands

awkwardly trying to greet each other but obviously failing to do so. The piece that is taken from the artist’s family archive, aims to activate an in-between space in order to highlight a conscious ambiguity - between intention and result, between action and inaction, between building and destroying.

This piece is part of a series. A Personal Archaeology/ Substitutes for Home, which is an ongoing investigation

in order to explore the notion of the fragment and its implications in various spatial settings. Similar to a minority identity experience, a fragment indicates a great deal of absence with its mere presence.

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FUTURE EDITION

SARA OUHADDOU

Impression//Impression.Vert #1, 2017 Ceramic and glaze from Tamegroute, Southern Morocco 7.87 x 7.87 in 20 x 20 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Born in France (1986) to a traditional Moroccan family, Sara Ouhaddou’s work is informed by the experience of growing up between cultures. She began her career as a fashion designer but eventually shifted toward a more artistic and social approach.

Crafts Becomes Modern, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany (2017); Marrakech Biennale, Morocco, (2016) and also had an exhibition of her work at the Moulin d’Art Contemporain Toulon, France (2015); Gaite Lyrique TangerTanger, Paris (2014); and Marrakech French Institute (2014).

Her work specifically addresses the diverse challenges facing the artisan community in Morocco, while generally questioning the availability of art as a tool for economic, social and cultural development in the Arab world. At the same time, her characteristic combination of traditional Moroccan art forms with contemporary artistic practices reframes forgotten cultural realities.

She was a recipient of the Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC) grant (2014) and the One Percent Contemporary Art NYC award for the Little Syria project (2017). She has taken part in residencies at FRAEME (La Friche la Belle de Mai), Marseille (2019), Art Initiative Tokyo (2018), L’appartement 22, Rabat (2017), and Edge Of Arabia ISCP residency, NewYork (2015). She is represented by the Polaris gallery, Paris.

Ouhaddou has exhibited her work internationally, including Global Resistance (2020), Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Manifesta 13 Biennial, Trait-Union, Marseille (2020), Our World is Burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020) Islamic Art Festival, Sharjah (2017-2018)

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FUTURE EDITION

SARA OUHADDOU

Impression//Impression.Vert #2, 2017 Ceramic and glaze from Tamegroute, Southern Morocco 7.87 x 7.87 in 20 x 20 cm

IMPRESSION/IMPRESSON In Impression//Impression Sara Ouhaddou experiments with creative processes related to the deconstruction of cultural codes. She strives to develop a practice in which ancestral arts are transformed into tools for emancipation.

Working closely with master craftsmen in South Morocco’s Ourika Valley to use locally sourced natural clay, Sara Ouhaddou’s handcrafted ceramic tiles are influenced by the sophisticated Arab-Muslim zakhrafa *Art of Arab-Muslim

geometric patterns.

Each tile, of which there are five distinct patterns, is hand sculpted and unique as a result of the firing technique, which creates subtle variations. The works combine handcrafted detail with a contemporary dynamic tension evoked through a bold use of space and depth.

This initial experimentation with material and tradition opened the door for many of Ouhaddou’s subsequent projects such as Syntax or AA, where the artist suggests a reexamination of systems of writing based on symbolic structures, such as Islamic geometry.

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FUTURE EDITION

SARA RAHMANIAN Tehran Subway, 2020

Acrylic on canvas board 24 x 18 in 61 x 45.7 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

ARTIST STATEMENT

Sara Rahmanian (1993) is an Iranian artist who completed her degree in Painting from Tehran’s University of Art, and subsequently immigrated to New Haven to obtain her MFA at Yale University.

Sara Rahmanian’s practice focuses on the intricacies of everyday life and the dialectics of everyday objects. Her paintings present the discord between direct observations and perceived realities. She evokes gripping emotions and creates new perspectives from which to observe through the depiction of mundane elements and acute angles of the body or space.

She had a solo show with Delgosha Gallery Tehran in 2017 and has exhibited her work globally, most notably in shows at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde and The Mine in Dubai, and Delgosha Gallery, Nak Gallery and Vartan Gallery in Tehran.

In 2019 Rahmanian created a public mural in collaboration with Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian at Reem Central Skate Park in Abu Dhabi. She is the 2020 recipient of the Yale School of Art’s Dean’s Critical Practice Grant, and was awarded the Rose of Lidice medal from the Czechoslovak Foreign Institute in 1999.

She presents alternative landscapes that skew the viewer’s perception. The subject matter of Rahmanian’s latest body of work includes the ambiguities between consumers and objects. She focuses on the apparent functions of depicted objects with an emphasis on items that have been discarded after their use.

Investigating the precarity of mundane objects’ lifespan and functionality, she imbues these with life so as to create surreal realms from which to observe.

Rahmanian chooses to paint with acrylics as she associates the medium with contemporary life. Furthermore, some paintings are made from coffee filters or sent mail, further emphasizing her subject matter. Other works reproduce perspectives observed from mobile phone screens.

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FUTURE EDITION

ALYMAMAH RASHED

The Lover’s Food Is Not Within You, 2020 Watercolor and collage on paper 14.5 x 18 in 36.8 x 45.7 cm ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Alymamah Rashed is a Kuwaiti visual artist who investigates the discourse of her own body as a Muslima Cyborg, fluctuating between the east and the west. The Muslima Cyborg rests in a liminal spectacle that compartmentalizes the collective tangibility of the mind, the body, and the ornament.

Alymamah received her MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design in 2019 and her BFA in Fine Arts at The School of Visual Arts in 2016. She participated in various exhibitions in New York City including the Czech Center, Parsol Projects, and The New School, and a virtual solo exhibition in Gallery Bawa. She is a recipient of the Masters Scholarship and the Merit Scholarship program by the Kuwait Ministry of Higher Education.

She was also a fellow at the Professional Development Initiative Program sponsored by the National U.SArab Chamber of Commerce, Kuwait Ministry of Higher Education, Embassy of Kuwait, and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences. Alymamah’s work has been published in Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, Vogue Arabia, The Visionary Project, and in 7 Days: Expanded Edition by AC Books.

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FUTURE EDITION

ALYMAMAH RASHED

Your Body Is Away From You (Sujood), 2020 Graphite on paper 16 x 23 in 40.6 x 58.4 cm ARTIST STATEMENT Visual artist Alymamah Rashed’s surrealist paintings investigate the discourse of her own body as a Muslima Cyborg of the post-internet generation, fluctuating between the east and the west. Rashed’s notion of the Muslima Cyborg unites the fleshed body, the thobe, and a combination of the two which comes to form a third space - the one that she emits onto her canvas. Rashed engages with the cyborg not as a mechanical object but in the sense of spiritual

intelligence, as a motor, or a form of technology, as opposed to artificial intelligence or programming. Referencing late Algerian modernist pioneer Baya Mahieddine’s idiosyncratic form of autobiographical portraiture, her art negotiates her female subjectivity, regional folklore and the every day banal objects that Rashed encounters as well as the rapid social shifts that she has witnessed such as the rapid industrialisation of the Gulf region.

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FUTURE EDITION

ZEINAB SAAB

Translate Beit, 2018 Silkscreen artist book 4.25 x 11 in (closed) 4.25 x 22 in (open) 10.8 x 27.9 cm (closed) 10.8 x 55.88 cm (open)

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Originally from Dearborn, Michigan, Zeinab Saab is currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her more recent work focuses on Arab/Islamic symbolism used as talismans, which originated from her previous work dealing with the history of bookmaking within Islamic art history, and recontextualizing narratives and philosophies pertaining to life, death, and the afterlife within Islam.

She received her BFA in printmaking from Bowling Green State University from Bowling Green, OH in 2015 and recently completed her MFA in Printmaking at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in Detroit, NewYork, California, Dubai, New Mexico, and Hawaii among other places, and is held in several permanent collections, including Zayed University in Dubai, UAE, the Arab American National Museum, and the University of Iowa’s Special Collections Library.

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FUTURE EDITION

ZEINAB SAAB

Small Reminders, 2017 Silkscreen artist book 3 x 4.5 in (closed) 3 x 72 in (open) 7.6 x 11.4 cm (closed) 7.6 x 182.88 cm (open) ARTIST STATEMENT The terminology used within bookmaking and its ties to the body is a relationship that’s that has been the central focus within my current practice. Like books, the body has a beginning and an end, and with the use of Arabic script, this gives me the ability to tie the work back to specific points within Islamic history, practice, and philosophies.

Given the understanding today that their history is shrouded beneath layers of soil mixed with the rubble of the past, my job is to make sure their stories and spiritual way of life are preserved in some fashion, and their history isn’t lost in translation.

More specifically, the Qur’an’s views on the creation of the body, the return of the body to ilturab (dirt/earth), and descriptions of the afterlife navigate the work. While utilizing Islam as the lens of self -portraiture, this connects back to my family upbringing and their practice of Islam, culturally and spiritually, prior to departing their homeland of Lebanon.

The current body of work is meant to showcase the influences of living within different cultures simultaneously as someone with intersecting identities. My objective is to gain an understanding that my role as an individual in diaspora is to document these intersecting identities that make up who I am.

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FUTURE EDITION

PEYMAN SHAFIEEZADEH

Untitled 1 (from Recycle series), 2020 Mixed media on paper 33.9 x 26.8 in 86 x 68 cm

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Peyman Shafieezadeh was born in Tehran in 1983 and graduated with a degree in Painting from Tehran Azad University of Art and Architecture. He has held six solo shows and has participated in more than forty group exhibitions which include showing at Triumph Gallery, Moscow; Hinterland Gallery, Vienna; The Redbull House of Arts, Detroit; and SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco.

Most recently, Shafieezadeh has exhibited his work in the 8th Tehran National Sculpture Biennial in 2020, the 4th Guanlan International Print Biennial in Shenzhen China in 2013, as well as in the 5th Beijing International Art Biennale in 2012.

He was awarded the Tehran National Sculpture Biennale’s first prize award in 2017, was shortlisted for MOPCAP award in 2015 and was among the top 10 selected artists by the 2013 Jury of the Façade Video Festival of Plovdiv. In Winter 2021, he participated in the Room 204 Art Residency program in Isfahan.

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FUTURE EDITION

PEYMAN SHAFIEEZADEH

Untitled 2 (from Recycle series), 2020 Mixed media on paper 27.2 x 21.7 in 69 x 55 cm

ARTIST STATEMENT Peyman Shafieezadeh’s practice looks for the connections between objects, symbols, and patterns. Each new body of work is influenced by and emerges from previous series of works. In Untitled 1 (from Recycle series) and Untitled 2 (from Recycle series), Shafieezadeh repurposes material from past drawings and collages, in addition to cutting out sections of these specific works and combining them into each other. He views his materials and drawings as found objects with which he experiments with to create new realities and aesthetics.

Untitled 2 (from Recycle series) is made mainly of carbon

paper, which he primarily uses as a metaphor for himself and humanity. Untitled 1 (from Recycle series) features the extensive use of gold leaf, which is a direct reference to the universality of its value. Although the goldleaf can be read as a decorative element, he uses it in between the empty spaces of his collage fragments, in essence distracting the viewer from mistakes or inconsistencies within his work.

Shafieezadeh also uses other found materials in these pieces, such as cutouts from posters bought from the street featuring local singers or imagery from advertisements from restaurants and hairdressers. These materials introduce elements of color that would otherwise be absent due to Shafieezadeh’s reluctance to use colored paint.

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FUTURE EDITION

SHABNAM YOUSEFIAN Untitled, 2019

Oil on canvas 36 x 48 in 91.44 x 121.92 cm ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Shabnam Yousefian started drawing and painting at the age of seven. She pursued oil painting professionally at age sixteen. After graduating high school, Shabnam attended Azad University in Tehran to study Microbiology; however she continued painting and attending art classes.

In 2001, Shabnam became an art instructor at a private art institute. She opened her own art gallery in Tehran in 2004.

Her artworks included painting and sculpture. In 2008, Shabnam emigrated to the United States. Realizing that art was her only passion, she decided to revisit her choice of undergraduate study.

In fall 2014 Shabnam started attending the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, to continue her studies. She graduated and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2016. Her early style of painting was conventional realism, focused on the female form.

While attending Claremont Graduate University, her vision started shifting to more contemporary subjects. Gradually her relationship to photographic sources changed and her style of paintings became more stylized and suggestive.

Shabnam lives and works in Upland, California.

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FUTURE EDITION

SOFIA ZUBI

Sheild of Music (Diptych), 2020 Acrylic on paper 30 x 22 in (each) 76.2 x 55.9 cm (each) ARTIST BIOGRAPHY Originally from Newport Beach, California, Sofia Zubi is an artist, illustrator, and author currently based between New York and New Jersey. The subject of Sofia’s work has been both personal and symbolic, inspired by actual experiences and dreams.

Sofia started her visual diary series in 2013, during her studies at Pratt Institute. Her body of work has since evolved into a narrative journey, illustrating the Princess as an illusive spectacle of herself. Sofia’s drawings and paintings tell stories through invented and historical symbolism, examining portals of literature, philosophy, and multicultural folktales.

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FUTURE EDITION

SOFIA ZUBI

SOFIA ZUBI

Gouache on canvas board 8 x 8 in 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Gouache on canvas board 8 x 8 in 20.32 x 20.32 cm

Building the Courage to Face the Moon, 2018

Fear of the Unknown, 2017

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CREDITS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ArteEast Board of Directors:

Naila Farouky (President) Diana Abouali (Vice-President) Hazam Gamal (Treasurer) Heba Elkayal (Secretary and Legacy Trilogy Co-Chair) Nathaniel Bowditch Ellen Brooks Shehata (Legacy Trilogy Co-Chair) Angela Edens Tarek Khanachet

ArteEast Advisory Board: Livia Alexander Lena Diab Karim Mostafa Katherine Precht

ArteArchive Advisory Board: Karin Chien Yasmin Desouki Coline Houssais Peter Limbrick

ArteEast Team:

Executive Director: Beth Stryker Legacy Trilogy Co-curators: Olivia Farhat and Lila Nazemian Benefit Producer: Song Chong Program Associate: Rachel Petrarca CUNY Cultural Corp Designers: Maria Barales and Nafisah Kothdiwala

SPECIAL THANKS TO:

Amir Fadavi Artistic Freedom Initiative: Ashley Tucker, Sanjay Sethi Artsy: Anlam de Coster, Matt Domino, Jacqueline Spar CHRI: Michael Eisner, Lauren Poehl Covington & Burling LLP: Nigel Howard, Sarah Elsheryie Mayssam Latif

EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS TO ALL OF THE LEGACY TRILOGY ARTISTS AND NOMINATORS. ArteEast is generously supported by:

Additional funding provided by: Asian American Coalition for Children and Families Inc, the City of New York, and the Department of Youth and Community Development

LEGACY TRILOGY: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE Fundraising Exhibition open March 7 - April 30, 2021

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