Abo Baker
2021 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
93.5 x 64.4 cm
Marwan Rechmaoui
Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure. They invite audiences to embrace disidentification as a legible mode of relating to and dealing with the social relations and material conditions they navigate and operate within. Abo Baker is an homage to Yemeni singer, artist, and composer Abu Bakr Salem Balfaqih, whose patriotic odes to Yemen celebrate significant historical events, such as the abolition of the monarchy in the north in 1962; the independence of the south in 1967; and the unification of both the South and North Yemen in 1990. The drawing is meant to depict a derelict oud , Abu Baker’s privileged instrument, getting assailed by the onslaughts against civilian life in Yemen, at the hands of the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels.
Marwan Rechmaoui draws on the urban and material fabric of the city to construct a sweeping and visceral historicity of Beirut’s atomized and contested narratives. His practice deploys both scholarly and embodied knowledges of architecture, language, oral history, literature, and economics to articulate some of the major questions of a ‘generation’ of artists. Rechmaoui’s work reveals, through unapologetically formalist methods, the violence of nationalism, collective identity, and social class structures. Through works such as Blue Building , Monument for the Living , If I Only Had a Chance, Spectre , The Coop , and the Pillars and Tapestries series, he demonstrates that materials such as concrete, rubber, tar, wood, and glass, when used to map a seemingly trivial neighborhood or replicate a building, can act as informed substances, archival records, or even living testaments to an epoch. The materials Rechmaoui uses form a politico-aesthetic proposition through which a multi-layered city and its native, exiled, and refugee inhabitants can identify their respective pasts, investigate a shared present, and speculate on potential futures. Rechmaoui’s oeuvre conveys the histories and complexities of our quotidian landscapes, as well as captures the sustained maneuvers of violence and legacies of collective struggle that permeate the walls and roadways of our cities and built environment.
