ArteEast is pleased to present an interview with artist Lara Tabet as part of our Artist Spotlight.
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.
She is currently working and living between Beirut and Marseille.
Eleven Fragmented Seas, Sea 01, 2020, Archival Pigment Print 120 x 180 cm
Underbelly, Vaginal Fluid 01, 2017, Micrography/Archival Pigment Print 15 x 15 in / 38.1 x 38.1 cm
Edition 1 of 5 + AP
Underbelly, Untitled 05, 2017, Archival Pigment Print + Lightbox, 100 x 120 cm
Underbelly, Untitled 09, 2017, Archival Pigment Print + Lightbox, 100 x 120 cm
CHROMA, Dark Brown 2021, Archival Pigment Print on Metallic Paper, 90 x 250 cm
Deep Woods, Untitled 02, 2016, Archival Pigment Print 19 x 28cm
LeReve Et Lasphalte, Garbage Fire 2016
Penelopes, Marie, 2013, Archival Pigment Print, 100 x 70 cm
The Reeds, Untitled 05, 2012, In collaboration with Michelle Daher, Archival Pigment Print 100 x 150 cm
The return of the old man to his vigor, 003, 2021, Unique chemical painting on silver gelatin paper.
The River, 2018, Bacteria on celluloid, scanned and printed on textile, Presented at the 33rd Salon d’Automne at the Sursock Museum, 2018
Parasomnia, 2020, Video 4’36 Commissioned by Beirut Art Center, Micro-Commissions N.3, Insecure
ArteEast: Can you tell us about your work in general and the main themes you return to in your practice?
Lara Tabet: With respect to image-making, I am often interested in spaces of tension and liminality. Oscillating between documentation and performance, I use the camera as a transgressive and seductive tool to question the position of the queer body in the public space. I also work a lot on the traumatic body in the city, as well as the cyclical representation of political violence and its relation to the personal and the sexual. At the center of my work is the diagnostic, forensic image and the information, or lack thereof, that it carries.
More recently, my practice has shifted towards the interplay between arts, science and technology. My ongoing research focuses on water as a site of political and ecological speculation as well as the analog object and its digital twin by looking at DNA as a medium for archiving.
AE: Before entering into the fine arts field, you completed your medical studies as well as your medical residency at the American University of Beirut Medical Center. Can you tell us more about your shift towards art making?
LT: I have studied medicine at the American University of Beirut and specialized in clinical pathology. After that, I went for a year to New York, where I got a postgraduate diploma in Photography from the International Center of Photography in New York. Then I returned to Beirut, where I started practicing medicine and having an art practice in parallel. As most of my art practice is nocturnal, being both a pathologist and an artist was technically possible. So I wouldn’t call it a shift but rather two independent paths that often meet in their concern with the diagnostic image. As a doctor, most of my work is looking through the microscope at images and trying to retrieve clues and information. As an artist, I question the image beyond the evidential information that it seems to give.
AE: What and who are some of your major creative influences?
LT: Larry Sultan for Evidence, his seminal work on how an image’s meaning is conditioned by the context and sequence in which it is seen. Roberto Bolaño, whom I come back to tirelessly. Apitchatpong, Claire Denis, Nan Goldin, and Ahmad Bou Anani, in no particular order.
AE: You were a recipient of the 2016 ArteEast Fellowship and participated in a residency at Art Omi. What were you working on during this residency?
LT: At Art Omi, I worked on Deep Woods, a photographic series that proposes a re-exploration of the folk tales and many mythologies involving the woods of New England.
The project involves going alone at night with a fellow artist resident, deep in the woods where they would pose for me, often naked and vulnerable. It deals with issues of trust and power in the subject/photographer dynamic. This work echoes my previous photography themes as a tool of transgression and is an extension of my exploration of representation and performativity.
AE: This past year, you traveled to Brazil to participate in Make Yourself At Home: Radical care and hospitality, Temporary Art Platform’s emergency relief residency program for artists from Beirut. Can you tell us more about this program? In what ways has this experience enriched you and your practice?
LT: After the Beirut explosion, Temporary Art Platform invited us to a relief residency in Brazil. Their aim was to hijack institutional funds and the artist residency format and use it to provide immediate relief. The residency was very well thought of. We were in the middle of the tropics, it was unreal, but all of this year was, especially for the Lebanese. All of the residents were severely affected by the blast, and this created a tacit bond. I used the time to rest and recalibrate. I didn’t produce anything but realized that I was now ready to make work again once the residency was over. I did actually make a video during the residency, Parasomnia, a work that was commissioned by the Beirut Art Center using their CCTV footage. The video was commissioned before the explosion, the blast was caught on CCTV, and all four commissioned artists decided to include it. It was strangely cathartic.
AE: How have you been affected by the Covid-19 pandemic? Once the global pandemic subsides, do you have any shows or projects coming up?
LT: The Covid-19 pandemic comes as part of a crisis package to me. It came after the financial collapse of Lebanon put an end (for now) to an already tired October revolution, and was interrupted by a criminal explosion. So once the pandemic subsides, things will not exactly go back to normal for me, for us. I have temporarily relocated to Marseille on an artist visa and am trying to find my place there. I will perhaps pursue a practical PhD in Arts and Sciences. We will see.
I am currently finishing a project that recontextualizes an Ottoman book of erotic recipes.
I am also waiting for the second wave to recede before I go to my residency at The Molecular Environmental Microbiology Laboratory, a biotech lab that uses bacteria to clear plastic waste products from the environment.
LARA TABET ONLINE:
Website: www.ltabet.com
Instagram: @laratabet
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lara.tabet.9
