ART NEWS
A+B. Embroidered stories
Clockwise from top left: ‘Lacrime/Tears’ by Moataz Nasr. ‘Untitled (Modules)’ by Sirous Namazi. ‘I Love Paris’ and ‘Bas-Relief (Pieta)’ by Mounir Fatmi.
incorporates religious texts from around the world, including the Koran and the Bible. ‘It’s not specifically about Arabic culture,’ said Cristian Alexa, of Lombard-Freid, the New York gallery that represented Fatmi at the show. ‘It’s about the idea that religions become a premise for explosive conversation. So you have a cultural bomb. It provoked many discussions, which was intended, and got people to think.’
MIAMI VIEW Artists from the Middle Eastern diaspora played an active role in the sixth edition of the international art fair Art Basel Miami Beach last December. The sister event of Switzerland’s prestigious Art Basel, the Miami Beach fair has become the most important in the US. It brought together more than 1500 renowned artists and an exclusive selection of 200 leading contemporary art galleries from around the world, attracting 43,000 visitors – the most yet. ‘There is a need to create a cultural form of understanding,’ said Mario Cristiani of Italy’s Continua Galler, who feels that events such as Basel Miami Beach provide an opportunity to engage in a dialogue that cultivates awareness both within the art world and without. ‘This is the starting point for Middle Eastern artists.’ Such a dialogue was notably generated by Mounir Fatmi with ‘Connections’, one of the most controversial pieces at the show. Fatmi, who was born in Morocco in 1970 and now lives in Paris and Tangiers, constructs visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from their preconceptions of politics and religion, allowing them to contemplate these and other subjects in new ways. ‘Connections’
‘Love Has No End’ is a new exhibition in the US which ties together the threads of Ghada Amer’s body of remarkable and influential multimedia work. Featuring nearly 50 works, her first major American retrospective is showing at the Brooklyn Museum from February 16 through October 19. Amer, who now lives in New York, was born in Cairo, and moved to France at the age of 11, later earning earned her BFA and MFA from Nice’s École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche, Villa Arson. While she is a painter, sculptor, illustrator, performer, garden designer and installation artist, Amer is best known for her deceptively abstract embroidered canvases, which on further investigation reveal lavish erotic motifs. By replicating images that she culls from pornographic magazines over and under the cloth, and then affixing the excess thread with a clear gel, Amer creates an illusion of mystery and intimacy that permeates the canvasses. Delicate yet defiant, Amer’s embroidery unravels Western assumptions about Middle Eastern women, gender in general and subjective separations between craft and art. www.brooklynmuseum.org
Showning at Galleria Continua, the Tuscan gallery that has expanded to Beijing and Paris, was Moataz Nasr, an Egyptian artist who uses video as a medium to challenge the political and social situation. ‘Modernisation through globalisation creates a conflict with local issues and identity,’ says Continua’s Mario Cristiani. ‘This conflict between tradition and modernization is very strong in the Middle East. Artists have a big role to create the point of balance between the two. They provide the linguistic medium for the local community in this passage.’ Debuting at the Nordenhake Gallery, Iran-born Sirious Namazi, who is based in Berlin and Stockholm, has established himself as one of today’s most interesting young Swedish artists. Namazi explores where one medium morphs into another: drawings into paintings, paintings into sculptures, sculptures into installations. ‘We were very pleased with the response,’ said Gyonata Bonvicini of Nordenhake. ‘It was the first time the piece [“Modules”] was exhibited in the US and it sold to a California collector.’ Nestled in the Design District of Miami at the beautiful showroom of Fendi Casa was Jordanian artist and jewellery designer Lama Hourani. She finds inspiration from ‘the primitive art that existed around the world before religions, ethnicities. It was a way of uniting people: the language is symbols, with no limits, no barriers. It’s very difficult to cross any barriers, unless you start before the barriers.’ __Eiman Aziz
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