Sampling at the Contemporary Arts Center

Be ready to spend a few hours at the Contemporary Arts Center to discover or rediscover twenty-four artists from far places like China, South Africa or closer to home Louisiana, gathered for Prospect.3: Notes for Now. The works were selected by Frank Sirmans, the Artistic Director of the biennial (now officially a triennial), due to their power to incite a reflection on "the everydayness and the strangeness of the world around us, to bridge fissures in the past-present and to imagine the possibilities of an interconnected future".
The three floors at the CAC are filled with paintings, videos, photographs, installations, and the visit can start or end anywhere. Each artist is assigned an area, with the exception of Analia Saban whose works are randomly dispersed throughout the exhibition. I started in the oval room where Yun-Fei Ji's wall paintings depict a modern tale of population displacement and urbanization on a backdrop of droughts, starvation, pollution and political corruption. On the second floor, two geometric abstract painters set across each other initiate a conversation. McArthur Binion's paintings are characterized by monotonous colors and labor intensive repetitive marks on the canvas. They represent erasure and rebirth through delicate compositions, legacies of the menial work.  Hayal Pozanti on the other hand, transforms the dullness of technology into a new language of organic shapes, bringing life and fantasy to a boring reality. Following these, Douglas Bourgeois's figurative paintings seem easy to interpret. Like a magician, he transports common souls into a perfect world of artificial happiness and transforms their dreary surroundings into fantastic landscapes. Next, Sophie Lvoff and Lisa Sigal are focusing on the local scene, respectively with photographs and through architectural adventures.
Tank, 2014, Glenn Kaino's installation is attracting visitors with corals in clear water glowing in a bluish light. A lengthy wall text describes the work and provides a cue to the title. The cumbersome technology required to keep the corals alive undermines the project which is focused on the oceans' pollution, especially by the military, a subject somewhat off the exhibition's theme. The show gets back on track with Joe Ray's work, a thought provoking juxtaposition of symbols followed by the images from Thomas Joshua Cooper, a photographer of light.
Among the four videos displayed (two on second and two on the third floor) Mohamed Bourouissa's Temps Morts, 2009, held my attention with its depiction of grey, fuzzy, pixelated Paris's outskirts, reflecting the malaise of marginalized populations. On the same floor, one can see Felliniesque photographs from Pieter Hugo, staged scenes by Pushpamala N., the Cyndy Sherman of India, or the installation from Manal Al Dowayan, a historical view of a culture born from the oil boom.
Leaving through the first floor, one cannot miss the installation from Lucia Koch, giving a new outlook on the street through colored glass. The works selected to represent Theaster Gates in the hall include Civil Tapestry-4, 2011, an accumulation of fire hoses previously used during civil unrest, and two monochrome paintings made with tar and rubber playing with the light reflections.
The number of works and artists make such exhibition challenging for the viewer. Political with Charles Gaines, poetic with Thomas Cooper, feminist with Pushpamala N., epic with Yun Fei-Ji..., but one realizes that the works have been selected carefully to fulfill the goals clearly stated by the curator.

photographs by the author:

"The Family Drone", 2014, Hayal Pozanti
"TC/0168.13 (Anthropophagst Wading in the Artibonite River", 2014, Firelei
"Mood Disorder", 2014, Lucia Koch

Manal AlDowayan, Huguette Calan at Prospect.3

Manal AlDowayan


Manal AlDowayan is a conceptual artist born in 1973 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. After completing a Masters degree in Systems Analysis and Design, she worked as the Creative Director of the Saudi Arabian oil company for ten years before becoming a full-time artist. Her work in a predominantly male environment fostered her interest for women's status in Saudi Arabia.
In her practice, she combines photography and mixed media to capture the often contradictory relationships between tradition, political regulation, contemporary Saudi society and raise awareness around gender issues in her country.
She has participated in several residencies including: Delfina Foundation in London, The Town House Gallery in Cairo, Cuadro Gallery in Dubai, and Mathaf Project Space in Doha. Manal has been inducted into various cultural leadership initiatives including the Clore Leadership program and the British Council International Cultural Leaders program. She has also been invited as the key note speaker in many international conferences and seminars; most recently at the Clinton Foundation in Little Rock, Arkansas as part of the Club de Madrid’s 2012 annual conference, entitled “Harnessing 21st Century Solutions: A Focus on Women” and at "Beyond Borders, The Platform for Small Nation Dialogue and Cultural Exchange" in Scotland 2012.

Manal has been included in international exhibitions including the collateral exhibitions in the  Venice Biennial in 2011 and 2009, the Berlin Biennial in 2010, and in Contemporary Istanbul in 2010. Her works are part of the permanent collections of the British Museum, LA County Museum, Mathaf Museum of Modern Arab Art, the Jordan National Museum of Fine Art, the Abdul Latif Jamil Foundation, the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), the Nadour Foundation, and the Barjeel Foundation. Manal AlDowayan is represented by Cuadro Gallery in Dubai. She currently lives and works between her native Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, UAE.

links to websites featuring AlDowayan's work,
artists-edge of Arabia
Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art
Delfina Foundation

Interview


Huguette El Khoury Caland

Huguette El Khoury Caland was born in Beirut in 1931. She is the daughter of the first Lebanese president after the independence (1943). She studied art at the American University of Beirut from 1964 to 1968 and started her career breaking barriers in Middle Eastern art with her erotic abstract paintings. She treated human anatomy, her main subject, in a playful way. She lived in Paris from 1970 till 1987 and she illustrated books, notably by the poet Andrée Chedid. In 1970, she had her first solo show at Dar El Fan and moved to live and work in Paris where she was  part of many group exhibitions.
Huguette Caland designed a line of clothing for Pierre Cardin in 1978, lived and worked in New York for one year (1981-2) and returned to Paris in 1983 where she worked with Romanian sculptor George Apostu on a series of stone, wood and terra cotta sculptures. Caland moved from Paris to Los Angeles in 1988, where she presently lives and works. She now works her canvas as if it was a world she creates, where distance are distorted and spaces widened. Her recent works often talks about her childhood memories in Lebanon.
"Huguette Caland is part of a generation of artists including Shafic Abboud, Yvette Achkar, and Helen Khal, the main players of the Lebanese art scene after the independence. They were the artists who shaped the artistic identity of their young country. All of them studied and worked in Europe or the USA and were greatly influenced by the artistic periods they experienced there. But they all remained attached to their country and heritage, and one could see that attachment in their art, where they always referred to their native culture."
Since 1993, she had an exhibition at the Galerie Janine Rubeiz in Beirut. Her artwork has also been shown at the Delta Gallery in Rome, at Tokyo’s Museum of Modern Art, the Faris Gallery in Paris, the Monaco Art Center in Monte Carlo, Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona and the International Biennale of Venice in Italy. She also participated in Europ’Art (Geneva), Start’Art (Strasbourg) and the "Brushes for Feathers" exhibition organized by Janine Rubeiz Gallery for the benefit of the Lebanese Foundation of the National Library in 2005.
In the United States her work was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Caland’s work hang in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris. Her work is present notably in the Monaco and Beirut collections of the prominent collector Pierre Naim as well as in numerous private collections in Lebanon, France, United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.
More recently she is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris. Huguette Caland will be featuring with a solo show at the first Art Dubai Modern 2014, presented by Galerie Janine Rubeiz.