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
