GuestRoomMaribor 2023

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CHARBEL A. DARGHAM, TONY KEYROUZ, JOY SFEIR

Charbel A. Dargham (2002) was born in Bwouar, Lebanon. He studied Film Studies at USEK Kaslik in Lebanon, before switching to mathematics. He intends to mark the end of his artistic journey with a project that combines in a creative way both fields, which have been closely intertwined throughout history.

Joy Sfeir (1995) is a Lebanese-born multidisciplinary artist currently living between Beirut and Brussels. Her artistic practice draws on the poetic essence of space, which is rooted in her own experiences with nature, society, the sensual movement of the body and the intangible imprints of memory. She graduated in 2018 from the Master of Interior Architecture program at USEK, Lebanon, and later continued her studies in Design for Social Innovation in Belgium, where she deepened her research in the field of interventions in public and social space.

Tony Keyrouz (1998) is a musician, cinematographer and filmmaker born in Bsharri, Lebanon. He graduated from the Film and Television Department at USEK Kaslik in Lebanon and is currently completing his MA in Cinematography at the Lebanese University - Faculty of Applied Arts in Lebanon.

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OF FRACTIOUS SHIFTS AN UPRIGHT ROOM 

Charbel A. Dargham

Tony Keyrouz 

Joy Sfeir 

OBRAT, Trg revolucije 9, Maribor
Opening: 17. 8., 19.00
Open till 22. 9. 2023, from Monday to Friday between 13.00 and 18.00.

This exhibition is part of a larger two-part project with the working title The House: between the Island and the Archive. The first part of the project is a residency of Lebanese artists in Maribor, which resulted in the present exhibition, while the second part will take place between October and November this year as a one-month residency of Slovenian artists in Lebanon. Both parts of the project will be concluded with a final group exhibition of artworks created in Maribor and Lebanon, which will be located in the Zico House Cultural Centre - a family villa in Beirut built in 1935, which was transformed into a cultural centre in the 1990s. As it is a specific exhibition space, both parts of the project were conceived based on an initial reflection on space, specifically intimate space in relation to public space, and above all on the experience of space. In the process of developing their projects, the artists drew to a greater or lesser extent on the book The Poetics of Space by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in which he used examples of (mainly literary) art to discuss the phenomenology of the poetic imagination, which is closely linked to the experience of space.

Space in art, following Henri Lefebvre, can be understood as a space of picturing, as an experienced space, a space experienced through images and symbols, or as a space which is subject to the imagination. In short, to some extent such a space must be distinguished from the strictly mental space defined by philosophers, mathematicians or physicists, from the physical space as the result of practical use and sensory perception, and also from the various political and economic practices of ordering and controlling space. Through Bachelard's analysis of various artistic images of (re)lived spaces in his book The Poetics of Space, on the one hand, the field of reflection on intimate and imaginary space is opened up in its interplay with the specificities of the human cognitive apparatus, which is based on the tendency to organise perception, memory and data on the basis of spatialisation, and therefore also on the engagement of the so-called power of imagery or imagination. The work of young artist Charbel A. Durgham, who works at the intersection of film art and mathematics, is particularly relevant to this field. Dargham's work is based on an analysis of the process of perception of space, which has been an important topic since the beginning of the 20th century, particularly in the context of painting. Indeed, 20th century painting eliminated the previous organisation of pictorial space based on linear perspective, which presupposes one privileged view from which the illusion of depth unfolds, by focusing more on the production of visual space on the pictorial surface in relation to a shifting, even elusive, gaze. The work entitled A Rather Peculiar Map, by contrast, derives from the visual representation of the stages of spatial cognition in each part of the image. It consists of collaged digital (found) images, where the spatial impression can also be formed by zooming in on each one, revealing on the one hand the use of mathematical tools (fractals, geometric representations of optical illusions, etc.), and on the other hand also the common point of all the images - the analogy between the mechanisms of storing, retrieving and processing information in biological and technological substrates.

In his work كفضاء, Tony Keyrouz touches upon another of the important problem fields in the history of fine arts related to the perception of space: the phenomenon of anamorphosis. In the most general terms, anamorphosis refers to a distorted projection that - like linear perspective - requires the viewer to occupy a specific point of view or to use specific devices in order to decipher a recognisable image. Throughout the history of art, anamorphosis has been a visual strategy based on the use and simultaneous violation of the rules of the linear-perspectival organisation of pictorial space, through which it has enabled the concealment of images within an image, or the representation of optical illusions, hallucinations or dream images within a geometrically and rationally ordered representation of space. Keyrouz's variation of anamorphosis, however, derives from the fusion of the static image (photography) and moving images (film), but also from the experience of technologically mediated micro and macro vision, where, for example, the aerial perception of the surface of water appears as a zoomed-in view metal plate, or the zoomed-in image of a muddy palm as an aerial view of the surface of the earth. The anamorphic effect of the palimpsestic video work is further enhanced by its spatial placement on a projection surface that diagonally crosses the exhibition space

In addition to the issue of perception and the cognition of space, in The Poetics of Space Bachelard also raised the subject of the experience of space in relation to the body, materiality and the materiality of memory. Joy Sfeir's work is situated in this thematic field, as her site-specific installation derives from finding old letters in one of the many abandoned houses in the Lebanese capital. Sfeir's focus was not on the content of the letters and identity of the writers, but - as in her previous projects - in the material transformation of the forgotten documents of human presence and memories in space and on objects. The spatial installation Invisible Witnesses (Les temoins invisibles) is conceived as a collection of phantom remains of objects, where a real intimate space, built to fit the human body and subject to the force of gravity, is transformed into a non-anthropocentric dream space - a product of a formative imagination, which, for example, also implies a specific logic of movement (floating, jumping, sinking and swimming). Through the phantom presence of objects and ruins, which is a relatively common specificity of Lebanese contemporary art due to the social circumstances, and at the same time through the engagement of the viewer's imagination, as he or she is in the presence of the decaying objects, the cracked ceiling, the oddly placed and shaped furniture and the darkened space, Sfeir's work simultaneously attempts to suggest the difference between the slow decomposition of matter and objects and the eventful temporality that transforms an ordered and established world into a chaos of ruins.

The works were created under the mentorship of Miha Vipotnik and curated by Kaja Kraner and Lucija Smodiš.

The exhibition will be open until 22 September 2023. Opening hours: every working day from 13.00 to 18.00.

The residency programme SobaZaGosteMaribor is funded by the Municipality of Maribor, the project The House: between the Island and the Archive is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. Production of the project: Pekarna Magdalenske mreže; co-organization: Vetrinjski dvor - Narodni dom Maribor; graphic design by Bela Ornik; technical support and the installation of the exhibition by Borut Wenzel.