The Backroom
Curated by Laura August
Museo Tamayo, Mexico City
Devil’s Lake
Curated by Leeanne Maxey
A collaboration of poetry and visual art inspired by the release of Sarah M. Sala’s new book of poems, Devil’s Lake. All proceeds directly support the artists and their chosen causes.
Beirut - Tallin - New Orleans
Manal Abu-Shaheen & Terttu Uibopuu
Curated by Hrvoje Slovenc
February 10 – March 30, 2020
The County College of Morris (CCM) Art Gallery
214 Center Grove Rd.
Randolph, NJ 07869
To look at the sea is to become what one is.
Manal Abu-Shaheen & Oscar René Cornejo
Curated by Laura August
September 20 – November 8, 2019
Radiator Gallery
10-61 Jackson Ave
LIC, New York 11106
Open Friday and Sunday 1-6pm or by appointment
Funneled by the persistence
of waves, the sea recoils
just to the line of the horizon
The heart establishes its equations
while history rules itself
in the next room
–Etel Adnan, from “The Sky that Isn’t”
Pairing photographs by Manal Abu-Shaheen and sculptures by Oscar René Cornejo, To look at the sea is to become what one is considers ways of understanding place, somewhere between vision and memory, emotion and history, self-making and post-war forgetting. Together, Abu-Shaheen and Cornejo consider how we describe places that are impossible to return to–at least in the ways we remember them–despite their central importance in our emotional and intellectual lives. For both Abu-Shaheen and Cornejo, landscape and its materiality become a way of understanding what it means to be a post-war subject, or to come from a family fleeing conflict: both artists’ practices consider what we know about a place, a landscape, and its fluidity over time. Titled in homage to poet Etel Adnan, the exhibition finds the ghosts of the past in our intimate connections to the landscapes around us. These phantoms wander sites of ruin and reconstruction, touching the edges of how we understand ourselves, far from home and up against the constant movement of histories.
Cornejo’s sculptures, made at the scale of the human heart, continue his longstanding interest in the materials of construction as metaphors for displacement and resilience. He works with paired objects made of cotton, fresco, wood, handmade paper, and woodblock prints. Many of the objects hold plants and flowers; they are made at the scale of the things we can carry with us in crisis, and they enact the enigmatic healing force of portable, personal altars. Abu-Shaheen’s photographs follow the lives of her brother and his children at their farm in rural Pennsylvania. As structures crumble and are rebuilt, the children make worlds for themselves in costumes, collections of objects, and outdoor play. In their intimacy over a span of many years, the photographs allow the brave embrace of one American dream to abut the insistent difficulty of building a life far from home. Seen together, the works connect in their deep relationships to color and material, to scale and the quotidian. But they also remind us of the journeys so many of our elders have taken, so many of our beloveds still take. To be “in the heart of the heart of another country,” as Adnan writes, is to understand the depths of loss, to experience linguistic and cultural separations impossible to describe, and yet, still, to stitch together a life of both or many places. To look at the sea is to study one’s vulnerability, to embrace endless movement, to feel distance, and yet, still, to find the center of the self, even in the heart of constant change.
2d Skin, Manal Abu-Shaheen
April 28 - June 16, 2019
Opening Reception Sunday April 28, 6:00–8:00pm
SOLOWAY
348 South 4th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Open Saturday and Sunday from 12–5pm and by appointment
Soloway is pleased to present 2d Skin, a solo exhibition by Manal Abu-Shaheen featuring works from two ongoing photographic series based in Beirut, where she was born.
Driven by the paucity of visual records of the social, political, and architectural changes affecting Lebanon's landscape, Abu-Shaheen has ventured to construct her own photographic archive of contemporary Beirut — a cityscape now dominated by advertising billboards importing Western ideals of luxury, happiness, and excess.
Advertising and urban construction are two of the driving forces of Beirut’s economy today. A decade-long construction boom, aided by foreign investments and neoliberal interest, has reshaped the city, which has been rendered almost unrecognizable as historical landmarks have been erased in favor of exclusive real-estate projects.
Shot on site, Abu-Shaheen’s landscapes and street photographs explore the relationship of a transforming post-war urban setting to its billboard advertising, the latter characterized by its monumental scale and increasingly congested placement throughout Beirut. Complementing her photographic work in this study, the artist has collected digitally-rendered designs from the Beirut offices of global advertising agencies and architecture firms. These appropriated renderings (of development projects both realized and abandoned) function as an archival anthology of images created by many different authors — all of whom are invested, to varying financial and spiritual degrees, in imagining Beirut’s future.
The exhibition takes its title from an Email exchange between Abu-Shaheen and an advertising executive who wrote her, “The world of advertising in Lebanon gives a 2d skin to the city, creating sometimes the strangest contrast ever.” Abu-Shaheen employs this description of commercial photography to chart relationships of time, history and place, while critically engaging the weight of the forces that produce systems of living in a postcolonial global environment.
Our Land
February 4 – March 13, 2019
Public Reception: Wednesday, February 13, 2019, 4:00 – 7:00 pm
The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery
SUNY Old Westbury, Long Island, NY
Artist Talks by Manal Abu-Shaheen and Aisha Mershani, moderated by Rania Lee Khalil: Wednesday, February 20, 2019, 4:00 – 5:30 pm
Beirut: Theater of Dreams
Bernstein Gallery, Robertson Hall
School of Public and International Affairs
Princeton University
Gallery Exhibition: April 23 – August 15, 2018
Artist Reception: Friday, April 27, 6 – 8 p.m.
Sponsored by the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
