Artists in the blowing of the East in “Mark Hashem”

There are several questions posed by the title of the exhibition “From Modern to Contemporary Art … Female Artists from the Middle East”, related to the artistic experiences presented under a general label that are Middle Eastern artists. A title that gives the reader the impression that it is an almost complete coverage of the works of female artists in this part of the earth, while such a proposal needs careful work in documenting and compiling these experiences, within classifications. more precise of her works, and demonstrating them according to their contexts and diverse concerns outside the term feminism. Thus, after a quick review of the works on display, the title seems to be longer than the exhibition organized by “Gallery Mark Hashem” on the “Artsy” website, as it is only a sample of some of the paintings in his collection, at a time when virtual exhibitions have become one of the few means of exhibition and sale available to galleries, in the face of epidemic measures.

In “From Modern Art to Contemporary … Female Artists from the Middle East”, the works, paintings and sculptures are signed by Arab artists from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Palestine, Helen Al Khal, Laila Naseer, Laila Al Shawa, Mona Trad Dabji, Zeina Assi, Maisalon Faraj and Sarah Shamma Daisy Abi Jaber. The exhibition presents (through the attached text) a group of important problems that, in turn, seem to be only a first step in the investigation of these divergent experiences. Limiting women’s artwork to the framework of a monogamous sexual identity would dissolve the privacy of each artist, as well as overlooking the many problems that accompanied those experiences and their special circumstances. In the text of the exhibition, the gallery departs from the male dominance of art in the Middle East for years without mentioning the other authorities that accompanied it in the Arab world. It is necessary to refer here to some of the experiences of women that for a long time were considered characteristic of cultural art, for example, because they belonged to what could be considered “crude art” or naive art. The works of these artists collided with many powers that go beyond male control, such as the monetary authorities, the display frames in galleries and museums, the colonial and academic authorities as well. For example, here we mention, for example, the works of the Algerian Baya Mohieddin, whose work is barely mentioned without mentioning Picasso and his influence on it.
The beginning is by Helen Al-Khal (1923-2009), not only because her works are among the works of the pioneers of the plastic artist in Lebanon, but because the Lebanese-American artist documented the experiences of female artists in Lebanon in the book The Woman Artist in Lebanon. This adds to a rich artistic experience, in which he did not depend on a single school or style.

Going back to her book, which was published in 1987, that is, in conjunction with the rise of the feminist art movement Guerilla Girls (in her critique of museums, galleries, and art exhibition frameworks based on ethnic and gender discrimination) , Khal deduces the circumstances surrounding the Lebanese artists at that time. Although Al-Khal considered his book a mere introduction to these artists, far from an in-depth study of their paintings, he realized early on some of the basic conditions that surrounded those who were considered pioneers of visual artists at that time. , such as the role of the social class to which they belong, in addition to the compulsory education of the subject of drawing in schools and the universe of Drawing is a skill that girls can also acquire at home, while this academic specialty cannot time consuming in some other specialties like medicine and others. There is another importance in the recovery of the uncle, who faced some authorities in his life who still persecute the woman in Lebanon until now, and that is the loss of his two children after his divorce from the poet Youssef al-Khal. She wrote in her open letter about “a very special human injustice” that “my son is my own creation.” And an extension of my body, and the responsibility to complete its upbringing towards a free and independent manhood is my responsibility, as well as taking care of myself. We restore the life of the artist, as an example that these personal experiences of female artists may not find their embodiment in the work directly, especially in the two paintings that the gallery chose to display on the site. As they express aesthetic concerns in the period between 2000 and 2002, when the artist once again abandoned the lines in her drawings, focusing on color, relying on close and calm gradients, separated by the same blocks of color such as blue, green and pink.
There is a restoration of one of the most prominent pioneers of Syrian plastic art, the artist Leila Nasir (1941), who had her first exhibition in 1970. Naseer belongs to the second generation of Syrian artists, who studied plastic art in Cairo after the first generation to graduate from Italy. In the hypothetical exhibition, a painting, dating from 2014, is titled “Hunger.” There are three bodies of naked women sitting in front of an empty table that I drew with various materials on a wooden board. In the absence of colors, the painting can be reduced to refined facial expressions, with the heads of the two women resting on the shoulders of the mother sitting in the middle. This painting is the result of Nasir’s experience, in which he switched between realism, expressionism, abstraction and personification, as well as sculpture, the spectrum of which was still present in his paintings. Parallel to stylistic experimentation, including some that have some of the heritage influences in the region, Nasir’s concerns continued to stem from human pain and internal and physical suffering. His paintings reached the maximum manifestations of human suffering in paintings of the amputated bodies, the bellies of their pregnant women, as well as the faces of the children of southern Lebanon in the eighties.

The exhibition focuses on the wars and social and political transformations that have inspired the work of some of them, and focuses on contemporary artistic experiences. We see the rifle of the Palestinian artist, Laila Al Shawwa, in her famous work “Where Souls Reside” (2013), in which she covers the rifle with colored beads and floral feathers, butterflies and wires. Shua uses an aesthetic language based on bright colors and vulgar elements, to project some social and political concepts. Thus, he resorts to lightness, to undermine the visual symbols that have long dominated issues, such as the Palestinian question, which is sometimes abbreviated as keffiyeh and Kalashnikovs. From the various materials for Shouwa, we move on to the oil paintings of Syrian artist Sarah Shamma (1975). Faces and bodies were transformed in his painting into a space to express the war in Syria and the humanitarian setbacks that stemmed from it, such as human trafficking of refugee children and women in particular. In his portraits, there are different representations of the same body and face, with different expressions. Shamma magnifies the scars of her characters through the repetition that seems to be an echo of those successive clashes, which makes her paint many pictures.

The exhibition includes paintings by Helen Al-Khal, Laila Naseer, Laila Al Shawwa, Sarah Shamma, and Zeina Assi.

Faces sometimes take their realism from photography, while in other works they are transformed into confused and distorted halos of the face itself through rough expressive lines. The London-based artist also translates these concepts in the composition and construction of her painting, as she gives children’s drawings and doodles a clarity that distorts children’s faces and makes them absent in a series (2016) presented by the Gallery. We also see the chaotic and upside down representations in the work of the Lebanese artist Daisy Abi Jaber (1961), who paints the city of Beirut and the memory of its streets with oil and various materials in a style that is close to sketches, and others are abstract. Zeina Assi (1974) invites us to the labyrinths of Beirut, and its alleys that sometimes rise on the shoulders of her children, especially in her recent engraving works, while we see Mona Trad Dabji (1950) with the naked bodies of their women and bathrooms in internal and external places such as rural natural spaces and urban markets in the style of Colorful and Simple. From Iraq, the gallery sheds light on the latest works by Iraqi artist and architect Maysalun Faraj, especially her recent collection that inspired from the interior spaces of homes during the epidemic, in addition to her well-known abstract works.

* Exhibition “From modern to contemporary art … Female artists from the Middle East” of the group “Gallery Marc Hashem”: https://www.artsy.net

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