Talar Aghbashian

Talar Aghbashian (b. 1981, Beirut) lives and works in London, UK.
Aghbashian’s gestural paintings are triggered by her discoveries and recordings of different landscapes. She also makes use of collected images, and different processes such as drawing or working with clay. They result in imagined paintings, where the landscapes are host to the different ideas projected onto them, floating in historical atemporality. Like an archaeologist, she delves to deal with the overlapping and intersection of different narratives in a bid to understand the ambiguities of our time.
Aghbashian graduated with a BA degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University (1999-2003), and completed her MA degree at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. She was a recipient of AGBU grant NY, and Benlian Trust grant, London, UK (2007-2008). She also studied curating at Birkbeck University of London (2009-2010). She has been exhibiting since 1998 in the UK, Germany, Lebanon, and the UAE, and has an extensive career in teaching colour, drawing, illustration and history of art at MUT University (2003-2007) and other schools in Lebanon, and worked as a curator at the Natural History Museum and the V&A, London (2009-2010).
She has been part of group exhibitions at: Barge House (2008), Cordy House (2008), Coningsby Gallery (2009), Brunei Gallery, SOAS (2010), Bearspace Gallery (2012), ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries (2012), Turps Gallery (2016), and the Sluice Biennial (2017). Her last two solo exhibitions were Blind Finds at the Running Horse, Beirut (2013), and Site/Sight at Carbon 12, Dubai (2015).
In 2016, Aghbashian was a recipient of the John Moores prize (UK).

Marfa’ Projects

For Marfa’s participation in South South Veza, we are proud to present a selection of works by Caline Aoun, Lamia Joreige, Omar Fakhoury, Paola Yacoub, Raed Yassin, Stéphanie Saadé, Tamara Al Samerraei and Vartan Avakian. Lamia Joreige’s sculpture Ouzai, is inspired from and based on the mapping of the main avenues and streets that constitute Ouzai, a southern suburb of Beirut today. Most of them were made without formal planning, in flux, often defined by the rapid construction of houses and buildings, and forming a network of complex structures and shapes. Caline Aoun’s Paperplane is object of ‘non-images’ prints, where spectral fields of colour are superimposed onto one another. It is made by repeatedly feeding folded paper through an industrial printer, resulting in delicate colour gradient prints, and paper jam traces on the folds. Her work Rock, 2019 is inspired by a rock lying in front of artist’s home. The sculpture of the stone is made of carbon paper. “Carbon copy” was originally the term used to designate a copy made using carbon paper. Today “cc” refers to the function in e-mail programs enabling users to send a message to any number of addresses. In Omar Fakhoury’s Office Chair, he found some chairs abandoned in Beirut while wandering – an activity that doesn’t come by chance in his chaotic town. He captured them up through photographs before portraying on separate canvases; their last function would be to form a parallel community. Paola Yacoub’s Paysages Élégiaques, is a suppressed form of death in life, akin to an archaeological discovery of a grave in an unsuspecting landscape. Read Yassin’s Visible Hands, is part of The Future In Small Doses: a series of photographs taken by the artist while he was traveling in southern China. The work highlights cultural differences and misunderstandings, giving us a glimpse of the quotidian strangeness of a post-industrial future. In Stéphanie Saadé’s Nostalgic Geography, a familiar trajectory, regularly undertook by the artist when she lived in Paris, is transposed onto the map of Lebanon. In her work N-S-E-O, A necklace is composed of a gold chain and four pearls, inscribed with the letters N, S, E and O : North, South, East and West. In Tamara Al-Samerraei’s Mountain the artist depicts outdoor spaces, objects, and figures that are stripped of everything except their bare essence. In Vartan Avakian’s Composition with a Recurring Sound, the sound of a river flows through a sculptural piece of repeated forms. The sculpture captures and makes palpable, so to speak, the movement of materials in the river, which includes water, biological life, industrial waste and other pollutants formed in its environmental surroundings. This flow creates a discreet almost inaudible resonance, that can be tactually felt on the sculpture