Selected Exhibitions
French Cultural Center, Beirut (1997)
Surfaces
Beirut, Lebanon
Surfaces
Paintings, etchings & the video installation ‘Untitled 1997’
(1995-1997)
The French Cultural Center presents Lamia Joreige first personal exhibition, “Surfaces” that includes more than thirty paintings which starting point is a reflection on the memory and the trace: memory of violence or fantasy of an absent and distant reality, search for a social and cultural belonging, an identity in permanent becoming. The work on the surface of the canvas becomes the meeting place between what is hidden and what is revealed in the foreground; in other words, a metaphor of time and memory – selective or amnesic, of society – its taboos, its collective consciousness, of violence – that which explodes and that which accumulates without irrupting.
The use of various gels, textures and mediums creates multiple layers that reveal various levels of reading and understanding of faces, bodies or cities; and when there are no objects represented, allow us to perceive the surface as a breach, as an opening, suggesting that something is always happening beneath it.
Catalogue: Surfaces. Exposition de Lamia Joreige. Published by the French Cultural Center. (French & Arabic)
French Cultural Center, Beirut (1997)
Surfaces
Paintings, etchings & the video installation ‘Untitled 1997’
(1995-1997)
The French Cultural Center presents Lamia Joreige first personal exhibition, “Surfaces” that includes more than thirty paintings which starting point is a reflection on the memory and the trace: memory of violence or fantasy of an absent and distant reality, search for a social and cultural belonging, an identity in permanent becoming. The work on the surface of the canvas becomes the meeting place between what is hidden and what is revealed in the foreground; in other words, a metaphor of time and memory – selective or amnesic, of society – its taboos, its collective consciousness, of violence – that which explodes and that which accumulates without irrupting.
The use of various gels, textures and mediums creates multiple layers that reveal various levels of reading and understanding of faces, bodies or cities; and when there are no objects represented, allow us to perceive the surface as a breach, as an opening, suggesting that something is always happening beneath it.
Catalogue: Surfaces. Exposition de Lamia Joreige. Published by the French Cultural Center. (French & Arabic)
Untitled 1997
Filmed in Beirut in the early 90’s (after the Lebanese war officially ended), Untitled 1997-2003 aims to reflect on the process of memory and narration. The same video is projected from two opposite sources on five aligned, of equal size rectangular Plexiglas panels – three sanded, two transparent – Images are thus reflected back to us, while also crossing layers. Those images and sounds are memory (as they are recorded), as well as fictions, (when recreated through diverse transformations). They appear as reminiscences. They are worked from and within their texture and medium, (video tracking and colors, sound frequency and levels, etc.). Abstracted, decomposed and transformed, they are often at the frontier between being identifiable and totally losing their origin, hence reaching a contemplative dimension. We are here in a space of continuity and rupture at the same time.
The narrow distance between the panels offers a passage that both invites and holds back the spectator. When crossing it, he / she transforms those surfaces.