#3 Homefront
Hear about the experience of British sculptor Sarah Larby under lockdown as she talks about her mum’s sewing machine, reading Laura White’s blog, and how working without walls in her garden-cum-studio has impacted her art.
Hear about the experience of Catalan-Peruvian photographer Lidia Huerta under lockdown as she talks about Simone de Beauvoir, adjusting to socially-distanced photo shoots and the importance of light in her work.
Hear about the experience of Indian visual artist, photographer and writer Rhea Gupte under lockdown as she talks about her studio in a small village in Goa, Frida Kahlo, and the surprise watercolour a friend’s three year-old gave her.
In May 2020, RUYA MAPS asked to hear about the experiences of early-career artists who have been affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. As our shortlist of submissions is being finalised, we thought we would share some of the insights that the artist questionnaire gave us, from emerging artists based in countries as diverse as Egypt, Brazil, Canada and Italy.
Iraqi artist Salam Atta Sabri has produced his own One Thousand and One Nights set in Baghdad. In response to the Coronavirus pandemic that has forced us to live from day to day, his drawings present an extended period of uncertainty and prolonged waiting through the character Shahrazad’s experience in the Arabian Nights.
Spaces that once offered solace at the end of the day are now uncertain sites for many. Unexpected pressures arise as we are forced to work among our families, return to our childhood bedrooms, or live in isolation. Our homes continue to offer us protection, but they are not the same refuges from the outside world that they once were.
“They’re whimsical in a way, they’re funny and colourful, but at the same time they are kind of sad.” Iranian artist Afsoon has started ‘The Corona Days’, a diary of watercolour drawings that chronicle the experience of the Coronavirus pandemic. Part diary and part art therapy, Afsoon finds her sketchbook “a useful tool to control where my mind was trying to burst out.” As part of the exercise Afsoon pays attention to the feel of each day. She expresses her first emotion on waking in her sketchbook, working on and around it through a cast of characters, quotes, and memories.
#2 Protest Art
On 12th February 1983, hundreds of women gathered at The Mall, a major road at the heart of Lahore, Pakistan. In response to a call from the Women’s Action Forum, the women had gathered with the intention of marching to the Lahore High Court to protest the proposed ‘Law of Evidence.’ The latest in a series of laws passed by Gen Ziaul Haq's regime since the military takeover in 1977, the ‘Law of Evidence’ required two women to give evidence to contest that of one man.
Web comics are an art form that has helped to explain the protests as they unfold. The movement began in the northeast of India, but has spread as many see the legislation as an attack on the country’s secular identity.
A protester in Chile wears a hand embroidered mask on the streets of Santiago. With one eye covered, the mask references the bandaged eyes that have become a common sight.
Photographer Tommy Fung @surrealhk documents life in Hong Kong and digitally manipulates the images. Here he blows up the sticky notes that have come to cover subway tunnels, bridges, and walkways in ‘Lennon Walls’ all over the city.
Protestors have returned to the streets en masse in Lebanon as the Lebanese lira looses value and a new government fails to form.
A gathering point has been Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square with its iconic statue. Erected to remember six Lebanese nationalists killed by Ottoman occupiers in 1916, the monument has a long history.
“Of the 51 fortified boundaries built between countries since the end of World War II”, Uri Friedman writes in his article ‘A World of Walls’, “around half were constructed between 2000 and 2014.” This is an astonishing fact, not only because of the increasing rate at which walls are being constructed, but because ‘a world of walls’ is often consigned to the distant past.
#1 Climate Refugees
With our DIY art kit you can make a print that you can use to show your solidarity with climate refugees. Put it on a banner and take it to a school strike, customise a notebook to jot down your thoughts in or hang it up in your room.
It is International Migrants Day, a day observed by the United Nations to salute those that work to overcome adversity and will a better life for themselves. This year, the UN has chosen as theme of ‘We Together’ which they use to focus on stories of social cohesion. It sees the 272 million migrants who are all “living new lives and building new communities in every corner of the globe” as individuals within communities.
Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture Refugee Astronaut could be read as a homage to these migrants.
RUYA MAPS shares some of our favourite artworks that reflect on climate refugees. Featuring works by: Justin Brice Guariglia, Otobong Nkanga, Rena Effendi, Yinka Shonibare, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Hashim Taeeh, Lars Jan, and Amy Balkin.
In a photo series, artist Pepe López has documented the beauty of the trees in Caracas. A beauty made more powerful through an understanding of the threats that trees in the rest of Venezuela face, and what their loss entails for Venezuelans.
The late John Berger wrote to the multi-media artist Randa Maddah that “fragments, not of the earth, but of a homeland, [are] expressed in the figures you create. Through you the self-portraits of these territorial particles came into being.”
After fifteen years of the Lebanese Civil War, which lasted from 1975 until 1990, more than 100,000 people had been killed, and nearly 1,000,000 displaced. One of the victims of the war was the Lebanese artist Imad Issa. Hit by an explosion that left shrapnel embedded in his body, Issa dedicated a large part of his work to protesting the war.
What motivates the artist Christiana Soulou is “a poetic dimension” that she “believes life has in itself.” It is also what serves as the inspiration for her work. The forms that are rendered in her characteristic style often originate in great literature, with previous collections taking reference from Jean Cocteau, Jorge Luis Borges and William Shakespeare.
For the multimedia installation The landscape is not a bookmark, (2019) Khelil has re-appropriated old furniture, photographs and documents to form a new composition. The choice of a bedside table, where you keep objects that are closest to you, creates a striking intimacy.
The artist Füsun Onur still lives in the house where she was born in Istanbul. A red house that overlooks the waters of the Bosphorus, she shares this childhood home with her sister, Ilhan. Theirs is a creative relationship that, like their home, informs much of Onur’s work.
The Iranian-born artist Maryam Hoseini produces work that shows “incompleteness as a condition of being.” The sense of being incomplete, ‘half’ a person, is a common trope when discussing experiences of heartbreak. It is a trope which Hoseini plays with through the fragmented figures that people her paintings.
In a new commission of six paintings, the Lebanese-Armenian painter Talar Aghbashian has re-interpreted the classical mythology that informs Dido and Aeneas. Where other artists in the exhibition focus on experiences of Heartbreak that are rooted in place, Aghbashian’s paintings are notably atemporal.
Maps are a universal medium for communication. They connect the user to the outside world instantly, via the obscured figure of the map maker. During times of conflict, the unique qualities of maps come to the fore. They reveal themselves as the graphic manifestation of political concepts that they were along
“I looked at the people. I examined their faces - that apathy… I wondered, how many of them know what happened and is happening in the desert prison? … Is it possible that this great people don’t know what is happening even in their own country?” After a decade of imprisonment in the Assad regime’s ‘desert prison’, Tadmur, Mustafa Khalifa is transferred to a different state security jail.
The Heartbreak artists Q&A chain is a mini-interview series with the nine contemporary artists exhibiting in Heartbreak. Each interviewee raises a question from their own interests, which the next interview follows up on, approaching from their own perspective.
The Heartbreak artists Q&A chain is a mini-interview series with the nine contemporary artists exhibiting in Heartbreak. Each interviewee raises a question from their own interests, which the next interview follows up on, approaching from their own perspective.
The Heartbreak artists Q&A chain is a mini-interview series with the nine contemporary artists exhibiting in Heartbreak. Each interviewee raises a question from their own interests, which the next interview follows up on, approaching from their own perspective.
The Heartbreak artists Q&A chain is a mini-interview series with the nine contemporary artists exhibiting in Heartbreak. Each interviewee raises a question from their own interests, which the next interview follows up on, approaching from their own perspective.
The Heartbreak artists Q&A chain is a mini-interview series with the nine contemporary artists exhibiting in Heartbreak. Each interviewee raises a question from their own interests, which the next interview follows up on, approaching from their own perspective.
Title: HEARTBREAK
Format: Softback, Pages: 222, Illustrations: 154 images, Dimensions: 160 x 245 mm
Printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor S.p.A., Calenzano (Florence) April 2019. ISBN: 9781645706731.
Accompanying RUYA MAPS’ first presentation in Venice, the HEARTBREAK catalogue features a foreword by co-curators Tamara Chalabi and Paolo Colombo, an essay by Themelis Glynatsis and an extract from Alain de Botton’s forthcoming publication.
The volume is fully illustrated with images of the artworks, and of the creative processes that led to their works. There are also additional texts, including poems by Virgil and Nizami.
The volume is in fact a three way conversation between the curators, the artists and Christoph Radl, who conceived its design and layout. He uses an old manuscript of Layla and Majnun as a template on which to superimpose the works that are shown in the exhibition. Merging the old with the new, today’s world with the ancient, Radl connects the universal elements of the exhibition’s story. The book thus becomes a parallel and supportive narrative to the exhibition, layering the different approaches by the artists to the theme in its carefully designed pages.
Title: Pepe López: Crisálida
Format: Softback, Pages: 64, Illustrations: Full-color photography (150 images), Dimensions: 21 x 27 cm
Publication Date: September 2018. ISBN: 978-1-64440-969-5.
Accompanying RUYA MAPS’ inaugural exhibition, ‘Crisálida’ is a fully illustrated publication designed by Beirut-based graphic designer Farah Fayyad, with imagery by Caracas-based photographer Julio Osorio.
It includes essays by Tamara Chalabi, Curator of Crisálida, and Elizabeth Marín Hernández, Associate Professor in Contemporary Art at the Universidad de los Andes, Mérida.
In a pertinent continuation of the exhibition’s themes, all the objects included in the installation are listed in the form of a shipping ledger. Thumbnailed entries, including unexpectedly personal descriptions of the inventory, highlight the clash between the personal and the prosaic inherent in the preparation for any journey. The ledger’s reference to shipping procedures for the international loan and sale of artworks provides a provocative extension to López’s artistic investigation of exile.
