The Workspace, work in progress
IT’S CHAOS, AND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THEM AREN’T CLEAR. I FELT LIKE EXPLORING THE COLLECTIVE AND HOW THEY BEHAVE
We are sitting in Beirut’s Ayyam Gallery, which represents her work – it was after the Shabab Ayyam incubator programme that she won her first award in their photography competition in 2011. She describes her real artistic breakthrough as the The Unseen series from 2013, also her first solo exhibition at Ayyam. “I always say my work was born from the conceptual movement in photography and this was how I got into dream and fantasy. The Unseen was my most developed work by far.” Then there are her cinemagraphs, which incorporate video. “Video adds life to the image, for a 3-D effect,” she says, pointing to one which zeroes in on the body of a woman in a white dress, holding a glass jar with a butterfly flapping its glowing blue wings inside. Everything else is still, but there is so much depth to the photo that the woman’s hands and lap seem to project out towards the viewer. “The stop motion enhances the entrapment,” Lara continues, explaining how the video is superimposed onto the still and she then erases all the other elements of movement around the butterfly to create this effect.
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“I’m also interested in psychology and the analysis of human behavior. In capturing the absurdity of the mind,” she adds as we take a look at her recent work, which was triggered by one piece from The Unseen – a vertical panorama of several people, posing, tumbling or diving into the water in their flowing fabrics. “It’s chaos,” Lara says, “and the relationships between them aren’t clear. I felt like exploring the collective and how they behave.” In one untouched image from her latest photo shoot, a caricature of human greed, people are scrambling in an office space, to reach the top, even if they have to climb on one other to do so. The composition is reminiscent of a Renaissance painting, which she says is intentional. Here, she is depicting different dichotomies from those in her water rooms: it’s another sense of confinement. “There, I always had windows, openings to the outside, women levitating around them. The lines of the room represented a Cartesian reality. For me, it always feels like a closed space, like this square we are sitting in now. I guess you can say I like to research freedom.”