Sultan Gallery

13 March – 29 March 2012

Take me to this place: I want to do the memories

Artists: Atfal Ahdath – Vartan Avakian, Hatem Imam and Raed Yassin

A multimedia installation by Beirut-based collective Atfal Ahdath, comprised of Vartan Avakian, Hatem Imam and Raed Yassin. The work lays out a constellation of forms and reproduction procedures around photographic studio practices in the digital age. Take me to this place… explores and manipulates the techniques that have fashioned a culture of reproducibility and standardization and accelerated the Arab’s world fascination with fame. Through the use of instruments indispensable to the comtemporary popularized studio practice, such as photomontage, the artists explore the potentialities of body doubles and image copies. The installation revolves around a set of digitally manipulated images, broken down and reassembled to include the artists’ face into the most remote of places. Portraiture becomes an art of disembodied faces and uprooted sceneries, infinitely reproducible and ultimately

Artist: Reinaldo Sanguino (in collaboration with Dean Project gallery, New York)

The exhibition will highlight the role ceramics played in the past as gift exchanges to form relationships. Sanguino creates groups of ceramic works that range from utilitarian shapes – pitchers, bowls, plates, cups containers etc. – to decorative forms such as vessels, sculptures and figurines. The ceramics are simple shapes and have little to no recognizable painted - glaze imagery; instead the surfaces are abstract and graffiti - like with elements of collage and assemblage. Organized into group based type - style, the ceramics will be displayed on wooden shipping crates at different levels to resemble the unloading of shipping cargo. As a whole, the collection represents the many and diverse relationships he formed throughout the past twenty years and the objects, therefore, are the material manifestation of the meanings of these relationships. The objects are some of his most prized possessions, making them an ideal source of inspiration for this body of work.