AGENDA

We are happy to announce the inauguration of our second space in Beirut. While we retain our flagship gallery in Karantina, this new location in Downtown allows us to grow our presence in the heart of the city, and provides a dynamic and vibrant platform that serves the artistic and cultural community of Beirut. The location is available on Google Maps.

We are opening the space with RAYYANE TABET’s exhibition Arabesque in which the artist tackles themes of cultural appropriation and original context through the lens of this stylized ornamental pattern found in all genres of art. The word itself originally meant “in the Arabic style” in Italian. Today, it still indicates an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines but interestingly, does not exist in the Arabic language.

Language is shaped by values, cultures and societies to express subjective points of view. Over centuries languages have changed, and words have been developed to name anything new or foreign: the term Arabesque was therefore a purely European concept, coined to describe designs thought to have been encountered throughout the Arab world. Although these designs were at the core of artistic expression -in a region where figurative representation was prohibited- they were henceforth largely perceived as patterned crafts.

The exhibition shows the Découpages series, a frieze of engravings from an original 19th century manuscript by Jules Bourgoin (1838-1908). The French scholar traveled through Egypt to study architectural ornaments and produced precise documentation drawings. His elaborate research was compiled in books such as Les Arts Arabes or Les Eléments de l'Art Arabe, two works that set the standards for what was considered « Arab Art » in Europe. Tabet cuts-out and recomposes individual pages from these publications, in an attempt to find different possible geometries hidden within the document.

The exhibition also presents score sheets on music stands of Deux Arabesque by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), a composition that interpreted the arabesque motif through music. On each of the sheets, the artist has drawn one letter from the word Orientalism. The ink covers certain notes, creating voids and deconstructing the melody. The distorted composition is played back by a digital processor, revealing the blind spots of the initial European interpretation of the form.

Rayyane Tabet's exhibition Arabesque combines complex thoughts, historical facts, coincidental encounters and emotions. While reframing basic shapes and lines from their individual context, he maps out the migration of ideas across time and space that culminates in questions of heritage, appropriation, subjectivity and perception.

Rayyane Tabet (1983, Achkout, Lebanon) studied architecture at Cooper Union University in New York and Fine Art at the University of California at San Diego. Drawing from experience and self-directed research, Tabet explores stories that offer an alternative understanding of major sociopolitical events through individual narratives. Informed by his training in architecture and sculpture, his work investigates paradoxes in the built environment and its history by way of installations that reconstitute the perception of physical and temporal distance.

In recent years, Tabet has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021), Sharjah Art Foundation (2021), Storefront New York (2020), Parasol Unit Foundation of Contemporary Art London (2019), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019), Louvre, Paris (2019), Carré d’Art Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nimes (2018) and at the Kunstverein, Hamburg (2017). He took part in numerous international group shows, among which the Whitney Biennial (2022), Yohama Triennial (2020), Lahore Biennial (2020), Jameel Art Center (2018), 21st Sydney Biennial (2018), Manifesta 12 (2018), 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017) and the 32nd Sao Paolo Biennial (2016).

(Photo : Aerial view of Sfeir-Semler Downtown taken from a drone footage. Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg)