Ghosting of beings and worlds
May 22 - July 31, 2017
Grey Noise, Dubai
The title of this exhibition is borrowed from the essay "Mathémathiques Existentielles” by French artist Laurent Derobert; In his work, Derobert tries to capture with mathematical formulas, impalpable feelings and emotions, using mathematical formulas as ghost traps.
The environment presented here unfurls in works by nine international artists. A ghostly presence seems to emanate from the works and hovers over the exhibition, creating a kind of familiarity among the seemingly scattered and heterogeneous pieces of the installation.
André Breton begins his novel “Nadja” with a twist of the Descartian slogan:
I haunt, therefore I am.
The strategy of ghosting is a common aspect salient in this exhibition;
Ghosting as a manner to avoid a pandemy of prosaic political discourse in the art world,
Ghosting as an oblique manoeuvre to narrate history,
Ghosting as a way to infiltrate a milieu saturated with speculation,
It is under this particular lense that the presented works could be read.
In his video Autoportrait à l’atelier, 2016 (archives 1994), Ange Leccia films himself in his studio, wearing sunglasses in daytime and playing offhand with a pocket watch. He seems to be scrutinizing ceaselessly the camera, like somebody waiting, or ready, for an apparition.
Vittorio Santoro writes obsessively every day, again and again, the same sentence, in the same place on the same paper, until the words become barely recognizable.
In his Night Cartographies, Charbel-joseph H. Boutros burns the periphery of a blanket in a slow and delicate manner, transforming it into a round-shaped territory, or a hole to capture dreams.
Ismaïl Bahri's video Dénouement plays on the slow and ghostly apparition of a human figure, from a diaphanous smudge.
Stéphanie Saadé tries to create fantomatic replicas of randomly found urban fossiles.
Prosthetic Love by Paul Hage Boutros, Sweden-based Lebanese artist, is a white Bible-size book comprising all the private SMS exchanged with his girlfriend for a duration of 5 years; An alias life contained in blue and green bubbles...
Artists:
Ismaïl Bahri
Charbel-joseph H. Boutors
Paul Hage Boutros
Laurent Derobert
Rodrigo Hernández
Ange Leccia
Dala Nasser
Stéphanie Saadé
Vittorio Santoro
press release pdf / view show