Mark Hachem Gallery
VOLTA NY 2019

PRESS RELEASE

The curatorial intentions that condition this exhibit are the multiple, vicarious, affinities implicit in the works of the four artists on display. In spite of the stylistic differences and variable ensemble of media, testimonies of meticulous attention to details and dexterity of techniques, their outlays feature remarkable conceptual associations. Longing, displacement, mobility, archival fever and gemological sensibility come through. At the same time an assiduous capacity of the artists to read the social text denotes a shared infrastructure, which in turn corresponds to aesthetic gestures --the translatability of the imaginary captures a symbolic form -- the back and forth mediations of sentiment or dynamic of consciousness that imprint a work of art.
Golnar Adili and Nasr-eddine Bennacer in Language Landscape and Letter to My Mother respectively, investigate genealogical filial ties translating texts into an aesthetic frame. Similarly, Ganzeer and Mahmoud Hamadani articulate a political intervention that problematizes the vector “I think therefore I am” to “I shop therefore I am”. Ganzeer negates the prescriptive potential of Descartes’s formulation for the future of knowledge to a descriptive regressive commentary on the present. Hamadani’s Clash Series is a magnificent abstraction of actual events and enumeration of data about the United States’ intervention in Iraq in shapes, forms, colors and shades. The brushstrokes are digits and letters of an artistic alphabet. Nasr-eddine’s Coffin piece that lies, naturally below, on the ground, elucidates the narrative.

Both Adili and Hamadani find inspiration in poetic verse that draws the praxis of their production. Longing and displacement are essences of poetics, and such metaphorical tropes are the embodiment of their visual imagination. Ganzeer’s investment in detention and Nasr-eddine’s migration at once arrest mobility and defuse it in wanderings away from the certainty of home onto destinations of frontiers unknown. Displacement and longing are, if not an inevitability, a probable risk. The curatorial correlations here profile the paradigmatic quality of the artist in engagement. This encounter is embraced by the Elizabeth Foundation, the David Zwriner Gallery and Volta, with Alwan for the Arts curating the show for Mark Hachem Gallery, Paris.