PRESS RELEASE
Ziad Antar |
Solo Exhibition
WHEN YOU LOOK AND YOU CAN'T SEE
Curated by Mihaela Varzari
17.09 - 17.10.2020
Opening // Thursday, September 17 // 17:00 - 22:00
SUPRAINFINIT Gallery
www.suprainfinit.com
Mantuleausa St. 22
Bucharest
Ziad Antar (b. 1978, Sidon, Lebanon) creates photographic works that hover between the medium’s potential for accidents, for claiming the hazardous, and its intended meaning for documentation. When you look and you can’t see presents a series of 10 photographic works, a video work and an installation which occupies the gallery’s both vitrines, and the Mântuleasa Mini Park, situated in close vicinity.
Antar presents three distinct groupings of recent photographic works. Out of ten pieces, six are shot using an analog camera, and are part of the series After Images (2016). They are the outcome of his research initiated in 2011 in the region of Asir, in Arabia Peninsula, which looks at the relationship between mythology, history and geography. The four remaining pieces, which belong to the series Dark Matter (2017), are shot using mobile phones; a reaction to the vertiginous obsession with the self, a symptom of digitalism. Both series create non-images, formless blurs reminiscent of crepuscular landscapes. Obliquely delving into local history, the third series Cactus (2014) is part of an installation viewable outside of the gallery. This work presents photographic documentation of a variety of cactuses, a symbol for Beirut, where Antar currently resides, and is paired with a public sculpture made in concrete of a full-scale mature cactus. The recent troubled history of Lebanon is alluded to in the video La Souris (2009), which plays with the invisible complicity specific to any power based relationship, by staging a simple instance involving a toy mouse and a trap. The title of the exhibition WHEN YOU LOOK AND YOU CAN’T SEE evokes a blind spot; a fissure of vision, that Antar’s works encourage us to stay with.
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Ziad Antar (1978, Sidon) is a Lebanese video artist and photographer. Antar’s work has been acquired by public and private collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, the British Museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation and the Aishti Foundation, among others. He is also the co-founder of “La Vitrine,” a non-commercial, street-level space for site-specific interventions. He studied Agricultural Engineering at the American University of Beirut before turning to video and arts with a residency at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2003) and a post-diploma at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2004). Ziad Antar lives and works between Beirut and Paris.
Mihaela Varzari (1978, Iași, Romania) is an independent curator and a PhD candidate in History of Art at University of Kent, where she focuses on artist collectives emerging around 1994 dedicated to employing the internet as an artistic medium. Her research makes use of narcissism, as it has been theorized in psychoanalysis, and political economy, as expressed by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s specific use of proletarianisation. She has previously studied at Birkbeck and Goldsmith Colleges between 2009 and 2015. In 2008 she has started publishing art criticism texts for Revista ARTA (Bucharest), thisistomorrow (London), IDEA arts+society (Cluj), as well as a series of catalogue essays. Mihaela Varzari lives and works in London.
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The
exhibition is organised by Suprainfinit gallery as part of the project 'What's
love got to do with it?' co-financed by The Administration of the National
Cultural Fund.
The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration
of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is neither responsible of the project
content or of the way in which the project results may be used. These are entirely
the responsibility of the grant beneficiary.
