Civil Society
2021 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
58.5 x 75 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. 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.
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.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » KADIST
Nao Bustamante
2010Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen...
© » KADIST
Gregory Halpern
2016Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California...
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/thenational/3WYM5PKXHWASWGOE63KE5FXY5E.jpg)
© » KADIST
Carter Mull
2013Mull’s Worker’s Clock collage works bring together images from the artist’s studio photography practice, found photographs, and pages from a phone book, laying them over a psychedelic warp of color in the background...
© » KADIST
Drinks at 6pm, Screening at 7pm This filmic portrait of Guy de Cointet , the French-born, California-based artist, compiles interviews with friends and colleagues such as John Baldessari , Larry Bell , Richard Jackson , Morgan Fisher , Paul McCarthy , Robert Wilhite , Christophe Bourseiller , Violeta Sanchez, and Gus Foster ...
© » KADIST
Gozo Yoshimasu
2017Gozo Yoshimasu’s double-sided work on paper Fire Embroidery explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami...
© » THEARTNEWSPER
An acerbic but highly readable view of the British art world Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Books review An acerbic but highly readable view of the British art world The critic and former curator Julian Spalding holds forth on his dislike of conceptual art and his love for Beryl Cook Georgina Adam 11 December 2023 Share True to form, Spalding makes no secret of his vehement dislike of conceptual art...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
“Learning”: Memory, Precision, Uncertainty in a 5-hour Durational Performance at National Gallery Singapore | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Arnaud Bouvier "Learning”, choreographed by Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard February 25, 2019 By Jocelyn Chng (440 words, three-minute read) Part of National Gallery Singapore’s special programme Performing Spaces that explores how space can be a “living organism” facilitating encounters between performers and audiences, Learning takes place over two weekends in March 2019...
© » SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Transcending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this musical ensemble plays a message of hope for the Middle East | South China Morning Post Advertisement Advertisement Performing arts in Hong Kong + FOLLOW Get more with my NEWS A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you Learn more The West-Eastern Divan Ensemble at the Pierre Boulez Saal concert hall in Berlin, Germany...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
The Substation: An unstoppable force and an immovable object | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints The Substation's Facebook page, taken by Mish'aal March 9, 2021 By Nabilah Said, with additional reporting by Ke Weiliang On Saturday, 6 March 2021, almost 300 members of the arts community came together in a Zoom Townhall to discuss the fate of independent arts centre The Substation...
