| ArteEast's Virtual Gallery aims to create an on-line presence for emerging as well as established artists operating within and outside the Middle East. An advisory board comprised of international artists and critics will select one artist's body of work, up to 20 images, to be featured every three months on ArteEast's website |
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ArteEast is excited to present the premiere of new work by renowned photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. Sanguinetti’s color photographs of places and people in Palestine are unique and compelling because they highlight liminality – of childhood, of old age, of living between what is staged and what is spontaneous, of living locked in an uprooted existence. In an original essay accompanying this exhibition, Lori Allen suggests that Sanguinetti captures a “tragic magical realism” in Palestine and does not replace the liminal uncertainty there with “message, hope, symbolism or sentiment.” Unlike journalistic photography, these creative works deal with individuals as subjects, not as objects in a grand political narrative. Sanguinetti, who divides her time between New York and Buenos Aires, gives us fresh perspectives on life in one part of the Middle East that is too often portrayed in set ways. These images refuse to portray, and therefore they break apart the image of Palestine, of the Middle East
Read about Alessandra Sanguinetti
View Alessandra Sanguinetti's work
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ArteEast introduces the drawings and photography of Ali Kaaf, which are explorations of black itself -- as a color, a material and formal presence, and a set of possibilities and foreclosures. More broadly, Kaaf’s works are visual discussions of the contrasts of light and form and their material possibilities. These discussions draw on, but are not limited to, different international histories of modernism. Critics have also highlighted a Sufi element to his work. And they have welcomed its concern with artistic questions unrelated to the political, in contrast to much of the art from the Middle East featured in Western arts institutions. Indeed, Kaaf’s work reflects an intense interest with materiality among many artists working in the Middle East, but so rarely acknowledged elsewhere. It reminds us of the necessary freedom of all artists to engage formal and material questions, and the truly international history of that process. Born in Algeria of Syrian descent, Kaaf graduated from the Lebanese University and later trained at the Universitat der Kunste in Berlin. His bright future was recently recognized when he was awarded Germany’s prestigious Daad Prize. Since 1999, he has exhibited in Amman, Beirut, and Berlin. He is currently an artist in residence with Solidere’s Beirut reconstruction program, and this exhibition features new work that is simultaneously showing at an exhibition at Beirut Central in Lebanon.
Read about Ali Kaaf
View Ali Kaaf's work
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ArteEast is excited to present the extraordinary paintings of Golnaz Fathi, a young artist living and working in Tehran. Her works are at once painterly explorations of color and form that integrate largely illegible calligraphy, as well as open-ended invitations to meditate on the silence and randomness that they often present. The viewers’ imagination is piqued by the symbols, numbers, and letters, often arranged in what seem to be formulas that carry history and significance, but do they? Originally trained as a calligrapher, Fathi situates her works in constant relationship to the calligraphic tradition, graphic design, and the dialogue between Iranian and European modernisms. Although transnational in conception and execution, her works reveal interests that are strikingly different from those of Iranian exile artists with whom Western audiences are most familiar. We invite you to take a look.
Read about Golnaz Fathi
View Golnaz Fathi's work
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Rafik Majzoub is a rising star in the Lebanese art scene, heading towards international recognition for his works which traverse the rich territory between the personal and the social. His paintings and larger scale conceptual pieces explore the many facets of this territory -- including the arrogance of power, the wounds it inflicts, the despair it creates, and even the possibilities it sometimes offers. His
most recent works deal with the Iraq conflict as refracted through the daily news media and individual emotions such as confusion, hurt, and sarcastic anger. Other pieces investigate the general state of humanity as accessed through personal unease. Viewers might also find in these works clues about how the current situation in Lebanon has been experienced on a level richer than the nightly news suggests. Majzoub was born in 1971 to Lebanese parents and grew up in Jordan. He moved to Beirut in the early 1990s, where he began learning art from painters currently active in the country. His most recent exhibition was at Beirut’s Galerie Janine Rubeiz in February 2005.
Read about Rafik Majzoub
View Rafik Majzoub's work
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ArteEast is pleased to present the work of Jerusalem-based artist Rula Halawani. Halawani’s photographic explorations of life in Palestine have been shown all over the world, most recently at the Sharjah Biennial. This exhibition features four series of works, each exploring different facets of the sensory experience of occupation through a manipulation of frames, focus, film negatives, and the photographer’s position. Halawani takes us from the intimacies of document-passing at checkpoint inspections to the crude inviolability of the separation wall, and from the settlements’ ongoing disruption of the visible landscape to the extreme burst of sensory assault that accompanies invasions. She changes a medium that has so often been used to “fix” and “document” (Middle Eastern life especially) into one that reveals both the unsettling process of occupation and the powerful role of documentation within it. By working with experience and process, Halawani gives us a personal interpretation of the conflict which defies the standard artistic, political, and even military attempts to define it and thereby fix its meaning.
Read about Rula Halawani
View Rula Halawani's work
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