AGENDA

Agial Art Gallery invites you to the opening of Rola El Hussein's exhibition on Friday 28 April at 5:00-8:00pm.

The drawings of Lebanese artist Rola El Hussein are intimate, employing the specificity of her everyday attention as a drawn performance of daily life. Her apparently simple opening of certain aspects of individuality acts as a reminder of the collective, the necessary routines and rituals, as well as the similarities and differences, that form the basis of human experience.

El Hussein’s drawings take such routine, the gradual accretion of familiarity in moments, positions, and gives them the vibrancy that they engender in her, puts everything in. She directs the viewer to the world as if it is being performed for them, as if familiarity matters. If someone noticed their everyday life passing, this is how it might look, how it might feel.

In fact, in El Hussein’s ordinary series the stage seems always set, the props ready, the individual parts of an everyday life providing the scene for the unfolding of some future film or play. The things around her, her body, a glimpse of the world outside, await instructions from an unwritten script, a simple word whispered from an unseen director. These drawings are settings and actions, props and cast. The script, we can imagine, describes the moment just before a cup is moved from the table, a foot shifts, a leaf falls from a borrowed plant. But more than this the unwritten narrative is one of space, closeness, and the direction one looks, from where, and how.

It is, simply put, the pull of things, the tension of one thing and another, the allowance of being directed and the tensions inherent to that pull.

Rola El Hussein, born in 1978, graduated from the Lebanese University of Fine Arts in 2003.

Unable to pursue a career in painting due to financial constraints, she worked for many years in different domains and countries, from Istanbual to Doha and Dubai, mainly in the television industry. 

Almost two years ago El Hussein left her job and moved back to Lebanon where she began developing her art further. Always having the tendency to draw the objects that she chose to surround herself with, she slowly began to understand the connection between that intimacy and her introverted personality. 

El Hussein is obsessed with the delicate beauty that she surrounds herself with, the simple details that bring her comfort and mindfulness, helping her to understand that for her, achievements are simple, not far, and related to the small and few things that matters to her.