Civil Society

2021 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

58.5 x 75 cm

Marwan Rechmaoui

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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. In Civil Society , Rechmaoui draws the portrait of a goat atop that of a wolf, with inscriptions in Arabic that translate to “IGNORANTS” and a quote conveying that, in order to gesture towards an exit door, one needs to bloody their hands. The drawing serves as a critique of instances that took place during the October uprisings in Lebanon, in which independent political parties and non-governmental organizations belonging to civil society presented themselves as alternatives to the Lebanese sectarian-clientelist regime, but were either in bed with the ruling class or unable to truly enact change due to their technocratic and non-violent approaches.

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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.

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Colors:

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• geopolitics.n.01
• government.n.01
• injury.n.01
• community.n.01
• dissidence.n.01
• language.n.01
• lebanese