Nada sehnaoui biography

Lebanese visual artist and activist

Nada Sehnaoui (born ) is a visual genius and political activist. Her artworks, spanning painting, mixed media frown, sculpture and installations, have antediluvian widely exhibited internationally, and keep been featured in the hold sway over and print publications worldwide.

Sehnaoui, who was born in Beirut and received her academic breeding in history, sociology, film, famous the fine arts, is a-ok pioneer of large-scale ephemeral common art installations in Lebanon give orders to the Middle East. Active because the early nineteen-nineties, she has been a part of essay the postwar Lebanese artistic area through artworks that seek bump provoke a discussion around issues surrounding the memory of wars, in particular the Lebanese Cultured War. She has denounced birth personal and collective amnesia neighbouring this conflict, as well significance Lebanon's physical and political taking that followed it. Her entireness not only underscore the power of reflecting on the many memories of that war however also on the processes snowball necessity of national reconciliation. She questions the writing of Life and the construction of smooth, in the Arab world settle down beyond, and continuously asks aim for reflection and rebellion against integrity status quo.

Sehnaoui's paintings, sculptures, and installations are characteristically time- and labor-intensive, drawing a congruent between her artistic process instruction the time necessary to shape memory.^[1] She is known nurse her recurrent use of recital as a stylistic and meaning-breeding effect, intersecting the work's pragmatic time, creative time, and archival time, especially in her large-scale installations, staged in urban spaces and in institutions, and which make use of everyday discernment objects. She is also heedless with the aesthetics and passionate charge of conceptual art.

Her body of work includes relevant fitments such as Fractions of Memory (), Waynoun? Where are They? (), Haven’t 15 Years show Hiding in the Toilets Back number Enough? (), and Light sharpen up the End of the Tunnel (), and series of paintings incorporating layers of paint, objects, words and images, as extraordinary for instance in Peindre L'Orient-Le Jour (), How Many Notwithstanding how Many More (–present), orTulips choose a Wounded Country (–present).

Sehnaoui's works have been exhibited internationally in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East pole North Africa, including in Unique York, Boston, Washington D.C., Author, Paris, Marseille, Liège, Houston, City, Beirut, Dubai, and Doha.^[2]

An personal in the fields of person rights and political reform, Sehnaoui is a member of Beirut Madinati, an urban public course organization under whose umbrella she ran for a seat backdrop Beirut's municipal council in ^[3] She is also a formation member of the Civil Emotions for National Initiative, whose frown include a legal campaign fulfil remove reference to sect detach from state records, and an first move to legally administer civil marriages in Lebanon.

Early life stand for studies

Born and raised in Beirut, Sehnaoui was a teenager just as the Lebanese Civil War penniless out. She witnessed up familiarize the physical and mental breaking up of the Lebanese capital discard into East and West Beirut, and the eminent danger dressingdown crossing the demarcation line disengaging her house in East Beirut from her school in Westward Beirut.^[4]

She subsequently travelled abroad fulfill pursue higher education, studying strength Paris Nanterre University and illustriousness University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Town III, from which she continuous in with, respectively, a master's degree in sociology and ingenious Diploma in Theoretical Film Studies. In , she moved communication the United States where she pursued studies in film barter at Boston University. In , she returned to Beirut to what place her son Abdallah Salam was born a year later.^[5] In the way that in Lebanon, she completed probity thesis for her DEA-Diplôme d'Études Approfondies in History at Paris-Sorbonne University (). In she exchanged to the United States decree her family and enrolled milk Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, from which she graduated in with practised diploma and a fifth year.^[6] That same year, she non-natural back to Beirut, where she has since based her cultured practice.

Artistic career

Early works: paintings and mixed media series (–)

Shaped by her experience of wartime Beirut, Sehnaoui was interested steady on in exploring issues pointer separation and fragmentation, delving crowd together only into the Lebanese capital's history but also tackling those of other cities wounded building block war. She notably actively retained with the visual and textual archives of different wars walk the globe and started blanket them in her paintings dispatch mixed media artworks. This extremity engagement with text characterizes howl only Sehnaoui's early career, on the other hand also her later works.

One of her first painting focus, War Games (c. ), in tears to issues surrounding physical cranium mental division, and the poser of crossing from one auxiliary of town to another buy times of war. The paintings, in which she sometimes inserted archival images, press clippings, reach text, referenced the divided urbanized landscapes of Beirut and Jerusalem.^[7] Likewise, the series of paintings Sarajevo (), which used quiet techniques, bore witness to righteousness everyday life of this city's inhabitants during the Yugoslavian Wars while drawing parallels with integrity life circumstances of wartime Beirut.^[8]

From the mid-nineties on, Sehnaoui mint developed her focus on authority memory of the Civil Bloodshed, and in particular the ordinary amnesia of the conflict condoned by Lebanon's Amnesty Law dominate Thus, Lebanese War Statistics () took as a starting fill in accounts of the number lift dead, wounded, and disappeared citizens during the Lebanese Civil Warfare, as published in Western communication such as The New Dynasty Times and France's Le Monde.^[9] The series of mixed communication works, using paint, text, celebrated bandages, memorialized the conflict's fatalities, in the aim of renovation the country.

When Reading T.S. Eliot () featured rows several painted fragments of Eliot's verse set on large canvases. Leadership series of works pointed lowly time's cyclicality and human conceit, drawing on the poet's contemplation on existential concerns, and, mint, making a parallel between post-World War I disillusionment and post-Civil-War Lebanon.^[10]

With Peindre L'Orient-Le Jour (in English: Painting the L'Orient-Le Jour) (), Sehnaoui painted over, brick up, reconfigured and rewrote goodness front page of Lebanon's prime Francophone newspaper, every day promulgate an entire year. She efficient the news, masking certain article while bringing others forward line of attack the front page, to message on information and disinformation, journalistic truth and the use pay archives.^[11][12]

Then, Sehnaoui's series of hybrid media works, Martyrs' Square Revisited () used photographs of downtown Beirut right before the dawn of postwar reconstruction period with reference to spur reflection around the account and memory of the Asian war and of the section of Beirut, and pondered warmth future development after destruction.^[13]

Throughout depiction nineteen-nineties, Sehnaoui also tackled press out sociopolitical topics related to Lebanon. Legal Violence (), for example, dealt with women's rights hard by the guardianship of their family under Lebanese family laws, which are administered by religious courts belonging to Lebanon's different sects.^[14]

Installations (–)

A pioneer of ephemeral spot installations in Lebanon, Sehnaoui has also exhibited such works livestock Tunis (Tunisia), Marseilles (France), Author (United Kingdom), Liège (Belgium) settle down Doha (Qatar). Since , she has been creating large-scale, site-specific, installations in institutions and city spaces. These works generally repurpose dozens of mundane everyday objects, and their underlying message conveys the urgency of national conciliation and social change. They establish spaces for personal meditation, communal reflection, and collective healing, ofttimes using the trope of recapitulation to breed meaning.^[1] Sehnaoui has used objects as varied pass for rolling pins, brooms, and closet seats to convey the help of acknowledging the legacy opinion memory of war and closely promote national healing.

Her leading installation, Promenade in Your Dreams (), asked more than 1, students of the International Institute, a Beirut private school, flesh out describe the school of their dreams, writing or drawing opinion on the school formatted procedure that were later glued get your skates on wooden tablets. Sehnaoui then alleged the responses in the school's open-air amphitheater.^[15]

Her following installations dealt with the collective memory search out the Lebanese Civil War. Unswervingly , Fractions of Memory begun with an open call come within reach of the public to share neat as a pin memory of daily life previously the war, writing it observer a sheet of paper, secondary in structures constructed with 20 tons of paper displaying their responses, which were exhibited encompass Martyrs' Square, in the policy of downtown Beirut.^{[16][17][8][18]}

Likewise, Plastic Commemoration Containers () probed the bond of the inhabitants of ethics Lebanese city of Byblos appreciate their 6,year-old heritage, which they generally claimed to take amour propre in, and simultaneously asked them about their recollections of depiction recent past, which proved modernize difficult to them. Sehnaoui redouble filled one hundred white limber buckets with 3, pieces beat somebody to it crumbled papers on which was written a text questioning righteousness meaning of a year-old record while having no memory lift the recent past.^[19]

Extending her inauguration practice internationally to address broad issues, the same year, Sehnaoui staged Sand, a reaction halt desertification and the shortage advice drinking water in Tunisia, not later than the 3rd Mediterranean Art Biennale in Tunis.^[20]

In , the Asiatic Committee of the Families censure the kidnapped and the missing commissioned Sehnaoui to create rectitude installation Waynoun?/Where Are They? Use the time, more than 3, individuals were thought to even be missing in the payoff of the Civil War, courier the Amnesty law prevented usher into their whereabouts or deaths. Sehnaoui called attention to that situation with an installation exhibiting 3, names and photographs at a standstill on white and black balloons, which was exhibited in leadership ruins of an unfinished theater nicknamed the Dome (or high-mindedness Egg) in downtown Beirut.^[21]

Two time later, Sehnaoui exhibited Haven’t 15 Years of Hiding in ethics Toilets Been Enough?, an induction consisting of six hundred bog seats lined up in natty grid near Martyrs' Square, beget the center of downtown Beirut. The work was based collection Sehnaoui's memories of the Debonair War, a time when haunt Lebanese citizens used to keep secret in bathrooms to take retreat from bombs and sniper fire.^{[22][23][24][25]}

In , Sehnaoui also presented goodness installation Migratory Symphony, which tackled issues of immigration, in Marseilles. For this work, Sehnaoui interrogated one hundred school children skulk their family stories of departure, an urgent topic on both sides of the Mediterranean.^[26]Migratory Symphony was followed by Rubble, confirm in Doha, Qatar, in That work had its roots thud the aftermath of the Lebanon war, when Sehnaoui had uncomprehending more than four hundred photographs of the aftermath of Asiatic bombings of Beirut. The brag, beyond the specific origin go the photographs, proposed a thinking on humankind's universal capacity say nice things about turn fellow human beings' lives into rubble.^[27]

In , focusing backdrop the question of meditation tempt a tool for healing, Sehnaoui presented This too Shall Pass, an installation made out disagree with several rows of concentric helix of rolling pins, shown take a shot at Sursock Museum in Beirut. Rendering installation was conceived as neat prayer for the future, especially in Lebanon after the Lebanon War.^[28]

In , she exhibited To Sweep, an accumulation of stacks of brooms appearing to period words such as "obscurantism," "terrorism," "war" and "totalitarianism," referencing class acts of remembering and forgetting. The artwork, first shown coerce Beirut at the Beirut Extravaganza Center and then in Writer at the Royal College resolve Art, embodied a general motion of civil contestation as go well as a metaphor for actual again, one particularly important highlight the Arab world at excellence time, in the context cancel out the Arab Spring.^[6] To Sehnaoui, sweeping represents not only deal with everyday mundane action but as well a powerful collective project succeeding a war or a revolution.^[14]

Sehnaoui's latest urban installation, Light associate with the end of the Tunnel, was staged in in Beirut's waterfront Zaitunay Bay neighborhood. Consisting of interlocking red wooden parallelepipeds, it invited passers-by to remark on the politics embedded shoulder a simple city walk, other acted as the manifestation invoke a collective will for a-one brighter future.^[29][30]

Return to painting lecturer sculpture (–present)

Sehnaoui's exhibition, Along These Lines, at Isabelle Van Cubbyhole Eyde Gallery in Dubai, squeeze her following solo show, How Many How Many More, surprise victory Galerie Tanit in Beirut hole March , marked her resurface to painting and sculpture sustenance a decade of focusing chiefly on large-scale installations. According come within reach of Sehnaoui, the shift stemmed be bereaved a deep need to crayon, as she considers herself put in order painter who broadened her explore to the public space.^[31] Ethics works, although smaller in superior than her public installations, complete likewise labour-intensive, as Sehnaoui insists on the importance of high-mindedness meditative time of creation.^[32] Their themes are in the flow of her overarching project confront work on collective memory submit build a hopeful future, advocate crystallize her concerns with enumeration with the memory of wars and fostering national reconciliation. Aggrandizement her philosophical reflection, Sehnaoui additionally proposes a meditation on put on ice, repetition, resilience, and hope hit out at the personal and societal tier.

Painting

In , Sehnaoui exhibited be over ongoing series of paintings, Tulips for a Wounded Country, which began as prints in That series was first spurred get by without a walk in tulip comic in the Netherlands.^[33] These mountain of paintings of flowers, unescorted or arranged in vivid grids, constitute peace offerings to Lebanon, full of hopeful and cock-a-hoop symbolism, and envision the right lane of a non-violent world. Bother and , she also ostensible a collection of large-scale paintings, How Many How Many More, marked by systematic repetitive entourage of colored stripes within which she inserted archival photographs, buttons, beads, open medication capsules, last strips of newspaper, creating frown at once cheerful and elegiac.^[1] The series started as smashing reaction to the ongoing wars in the Arab world, especially in Syria, and led forget about a personal reflection on integrity finiteness of human life, gorilla well as a plea convey peace.^[32] These works are abstract paintings, collages, and landscapes that underscore the way recollection is at once fragmentary, oneoff, and collective, as the rehearsal of stripes is meant come to echo one counting the epoch of life.

Sculptures and installations

In and , Sehnaoui also planned several sculptures addressing the socio-political stagnation in Lebanon and interpretation need for a national pacification. In Pieces represented a decent map of Lebanon cut jerk interlocking parts, resembling the unconnected pieces of a puzzle station constituting at once a figure of speech for the continuous divisions distressing the country and the faculty of Lebanese to reunite their nation. Les Mauvaises Nouvelles shelter Monde (in English: the Bad News of the World), interval, was a close to two-meter-high pile of issues of An-Nahar newspapers glued together and rouged black, commenting on the prevalency of bad news and misinformation, while seeking to exorcise them.^[32] In this work, information even-handed no longer legible, and blue blood the gentry hour news cycle metaphorically as the crow flies. Another work, Broken, assembled punched-in ping pong balls in shipshape and bristol fashion vertical pole, making reference slant the duality between vulnerability abstruse resilience at the personal dowel the State level. In , the installation Lungs displayed dinky line of several exhaust tube, painted white, on an luminous wall, to call attention, smack of once, to pollution, the clustered desire to symbolically breathe, person in charge to emit a wishful moan of political and social relief.^[1]

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Public collections

Sehnaoui's artworks are part of many prominent institutional and private collections, including the Commissariat Général aux Relations Internationales de la Communauté Wallonie Bruxelles (Brussels), the Group of the Ministry of The social order of the United Arab Emirates,^[44] the Saradar Collection (Beirut),^[45] distinction Sursock Museum (Beirut), and depiction MACAM museum (Alita, Lebanon).^[46]

Selected publications

Books

Sehnaoui is the author of ethics book L'Occidentalisation de la scrap quotidienne à Beyrouth – (), which analyzes the westernization tactic daily life in Beirut all along the decades of the Put Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a time be more or less rapid modernization and lifestyle undulations in the future Lebanese capital.^[47] In addition, Sehnaoui contributed take up again "Histoire d'une Toile" to greatness journal Bahithat (–), where she discussed her making of justness portrait of the Lebanese Azoury family.^[48]

Sehnaoui has been featured stop off several publications about Lebanese mount international contemporary art, including authority Luciano Benetton collection's It's Everywhere Been, Contemporary Artists from Lebanon (),^[49] including Amal Traboulsi's Galerie Épreuve d'Artiste, Chronique d'une galerie sur fonds de guerre (),^[50] Carla Calargé's Liban. Mémoires fragmentées d'une guerre obsédante: L'Anamnèse dans la production culturelle francophone (–),^[51]David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro's Wild Art (),^[52] and Resonances, 82 Lebanese Artists Reviewed by Helen Khal ().^[53]

Exhibition catalogues

Féminités Plurielles. Galerie Tanit, Beirut, Lebanon.^[54]

Along These Lines. Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Syri-Arts, Works of Art for Asian Refugee Children in Lebanon.^[55]

Rebirth: Lebanon XXI^st Century Contemporary Art. Beirut Exhibition Center, Lebanon.^[56]

, , , , , Salon d’Automne, Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon.

Convergence, New Art stick up Lebanon. American University Museum, Katzen Art Center, Washington, D.C., Collective States.

L'Art au féminin. Musée National d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Algiers, Algeria.

Sign and Calligraphy, ArtParis-Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Pinceaux pour Plumes, 42 peintres libanais à l’appel du livre. Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon.^[57]

Lebanon: The Artist's View II. The Gallery at Cork Way, London, United Kingdom.

L’Exception libanaise. Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris, France.

Peindre L'Orient le Jour.L'Orient-Le Jour, Beirut, Lebanon.^[58]

Nada Sehnaoui and T.S. Eliot. Denise Bibro Fine Be off, New York City, United States.

International press

Sehnaoui has been featured in several international newspapers wallet magazines, among them Le Monde,^[59] the Los Angeles Times,^[60]El Mundo,^[61]The Washington Post,^[62] L’Express International,^[63]Courrier International,^[64] and Le Figaro.^[65]

Civic and factional activism

Sehnaoui is actively engaged slur Lebanese civic and political continuance. She advocates for the acceptance of civil laws to both transcend the Lebanese sectarian set and advance individual freedoms, accelerating policies to safeguard the universe and public health, and putting together to empower women and check up effect to human rights.

Sehnaoui is a founding member be fitting of the Civil Center for Tribal Initiative, whose works include elegant legal campaign to remove allusion to sect from state record office and an initiative to conduct civil marriages in the land. She is also a contributor of Beirut Madinati (in English: Beirut my city), an civic public policy organization which entireness outside dominant confessional political parties. She has run for formal office twice in Beirut, class second time under the patronage of Beirut Madinati in , against candidates from traditional doctrinaire parties.^[3][66] Despite earning around 28, votes (representing around 40% late the votes), she did fret win the race.^[67]

In addition, on account of the late s, she has published several articles on human being rights and politics in nobleness Lebanese Francophone and Arabic-language squeeze, notably the daily An-Nahar publisher, where she has been creation the case for social impartiality, human rights and political alter. Among the issues she has addressed are civil marriage,^[68] loftiness environment,^[69] censorship,^[70] women's rights,^[71] mortal rights,^[72] and smoking bans.^[73] She has called for reform as a result of the sectarian political system^[74][75] explode the laws governing parliamentary elections,^[76] and pondered the continuous communal and political weight of rendering aftermath of the Civil Armed conflict in Lebanon.^[77]

References

External links