Lawrie Shabibi is participating in ArtInternational Istanbul, Istanbul’s new contemporary art fair, which will run concurrently with the Istanbul Biennial. Lawrie Shabibi will be presenting works by Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Shahpour Pouyan, Driss Ouadahi, Larissa Sansour, Marwan Sahramani, Wafaa Bilal and Selma Gürbüz in a curated booth which explores a specific theme- The Poetics of Time. Through these works we explore the different ways that artists appropriate past histories and fictional futures to build a narrative.
The booth revolves around a new sculpture from New-York based Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan’s Projectile series, a suspended sculpture that will serve as a centrepiece for other works. Working with traditional armourers and metal-smiths, Pouyan morphs intricately decorated costume armour and military helmets into the shape of modern rockets. Related to this will be a large work from the Huroub series of Marwan Sahmarani, a Beirut-based painter fascinated in medieval battles, the cycle of ideological wars and art history, and Selma Gürbüz’s enigmatic works on paper, which in their otherness recall the illustrations of arcane manuscripts of the medieval Middle East.
In stark contrast to these works, we will present photographs from Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate series and from Wafaa Bilal’s Ashes series. Sansour’s images evoke a future in which all of Palestine and its population are squeezed into a single tower block. Bilal, on the other hand, re-imagines historical events, using photojournalistic archives to hand-construct models of bombed architectural sites in Iraq. These are then photographed to recreate the destructive effects of war on private spaces.
Driss Ouadahi’s almost photorealistic Fence paintings recall the wire-netting common in the metropolitan suburbs of France and in Algeria, where the artist grew up. Although meant to delimit zones into which entrance is not permitted, in Ouadahi’s paintings they become subjects for lyrical abstraction. Nadia Kaabi-Linke also takes urban delineations as a point of departure: her interest is in architectural spaces that have historic, political or cultural significance producing paintings that are subtle impressions from the walls of such locations. At ArtInternational Istanbul we will be showing a major work from this ongoing series. Rue El Azafine alludes to a particular encounter between the artist and a bystander, which becomes a metaphor for the regressive attitudes now prevalent in her native Tunisia.
Image: © Wafaa Bilal, Lawrie Shabibi Gallery
