I visited the Chelsea galleries on opening night back in late mid-June (before I took a month-long break to move apartments and to travel to Germany) and this is the only exhibit I remember, Stux Gallery’s Barakat: The Gift. I’m pretty convinced that the measure of a successful art experience — whether a painting, film, play, etc. — is if it stays with you for days afterward. Is it memorable? If yes, then it matters, and in my humble opinion, it is successful.
Anyway, I’m still thinking about Barakat and want to visit this show again. I have time. It’s, not coincidentally of course, running till September 11th. Put together by Italian curator and critic Gaia Serena, the show includes nine Middle Eastern and African artists’ work that relates to the concept of “barakat,” which in Arabic means a blessed gift from God (though it can be a gift used in the wrong way, according to the show’s press release). Though the theme is open-ended, the resultant display deals heavily with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab diaspora, and the East-West culture and ideology clash.
The show includes mostly 2D work, paintings and photographs. Much of the art here deals very specifically with war imagery, including Moataz Nasr’s war scenes with Arabic writing on quilts meant to mimic propaganda, Shadi Ghadirian’s photographs of a soldier’s clothes and tools (including boots, gas mask, and shattered artillery) wrapped in those symbolic red ribbons, and Turkish artist Baris Saribas’ paintings of planes dropping bombs in an abstract expressionist style.
One of my two favorites in the show is this image by photographer Sara Rahbar, one of many in a series devoted to flags worn as textiles:
The series is called “Love Arrived and How Red.” I like how Rahbar brings a pop art sensibility — of combining a series of potent symbols and images — to photo portraiture. This startling combination of symbols — flag, wedding dress, mask — acknowledges the complicated identity of a Middle Eastern-American woman and the prejudices that each side of that equation are burdened by.
Also hauntingly compelling is the series by Iraqi artist (who now lives in Colorado) Halim Al-Kalim. His digitally enhanced photos are composites that fuse real with the surreal. Behold the plasticity, or the veneer, of the surface and easily digestible monochrome whiteness against the raw humanity of the eyes in this triptych, below, from “Witness from Baghdad”:
Peaceful and fearsome are these images. After reading more, I learned that the artist is invested in exploring opposing emotional realities, and that these faces — recycled in different ways in his recent works — represent his “inner consciousness” (according to a SaatchiGallery.com write-up on the artist). The Iraqi-born artist had a firsthand experience with war. He opposed Saddam Hussein’s military regime during the first Gulf War and escaped to the countryside where he hid in a hole covered by rocks for three years. Local Bedouin villager women were his saving grace and helped him to survive. This harrowing journey shaped him as an artist — these haunting images are meditations on those experiences. Al-Kalim now lives in Colorado.
