16 May 2006

Review

BEIRUT: One couldn't accuse Zena al-Khalil of idleness. The twentysomething artist is the cofounder of two arts organizations - Xanadu, a bicontinental artists' space promoting young and emerging talent, and Al-Jissir, a foundation that calls international attention to more established Arab artists. She is an advisor to the International Museum of Women's ambitious "Imagining Ourselves" project and a volunteer coordinator for Greenpeace. She is in the final stages of curating an upcoming group show (tentative title: "Shou Tabkha Ya Mara?" or "What Are You Cooking, Woman?") at Art Lounge, the Beirut gallery, club and boutique combo located at the mouth of Corniche al-Nahr.

And if that weren't enough to fill her days, Khalil just opened her first proper solo exhibition at Espace SD as well, filling the vast gallery space with hundreds, probably thousands, possibly millions of objects and artworks.

The price list for "I Love You," as Khalil's show is called, delineates 63 separate works, but those are just the major pieces. Complementing her large-scale paintings on raw canvas and her preciously small works stretched on self-made wooden cubes are a series of small shrines packed in boxes and illuminated with flashing lights. There is a massive installation filling the entire back-left quadrant of the gallery replete with pink fabric strewn across the floor and a disco ball fashioned into the name "Allah" hanging from the ceiling and rotating just so. And there are scores upon scores of tiny toy soldiers painted pink and placed in formations along every window sill and crevice between floor and ceiling.

Probably more so than any artist working in Beirut now and there are a number working in this vein Khalil is a collector. She is not amassing newspaper clippings related to the cases of missing persons (like Rabih Mroue), mid-twentieth century studio portraiture from the Arab world (like Akram Zaatari) or documents related to Lebanon's contemporary history (like Walid Raad and the Atlas Group). Khalil's stomping ground is not the critically constructed archive but rather the anarchy and idiosyncrasy of the dollar shop.

The stuff of her art is, well, everything you can think of that might fall under the categories of plastic crap, cheap decoration and useless trinketry. If it glitters and shines, glows and blinks, then it goes into Khalil's work in abundance. If it's pink, or can be made pink, then all the better.

There are Barbie dolls, fake flowers, magnetic letters, miniature figurines, gold sticker stars, random buttons and enough bathtub Marys to fill a white-trash trailer park in the Bible belt. There are photocopied photographs pasted onto thin plywood; painted over in acrylics; and layered with arabesques and geometric patterns adorned with glitter.

To walk into Khalil's show is to be overwhelmed by the artist's exuberant style. One word resonates like a meddlesome, night-piercing car alarm kitsch. Yet Khalil is iffy about characterizing her work as such. "Kitsch is something that involves sarcasm," says Khalil, who has lately chopped off her brunette locks and opted for a bleached blond, funked out, Marilyn Monroe-style bob. "It's cynical. I use glitter because it shines, because it reflects light ... because it makes me happy. And I think there's nothing wrong with being happy ... There's this idea that artists have to be crazy and disturbed but I am just leaving space for people to think."

Still, it takes a while to digest the sheer accumulation of things on view in Khalil's show. Once one acclimates to the glitter and the blinking lights and the pink and that Allah disco ball, one notices that there's more images of Ayatollah Khomeini, Musa Sadr, Nabih Berri, the wreckage of Beirut's Holiday Inn, a female Kataeb fighter crossed with a femme fatale, anonymous militiamen from Lebanon's civil war days, child soldiers circa the Iranian Revolution. What? And then there's the tarot cards, the henna, the dolls in veils, the African batiks, the soft sculptures like Giacometti's men reproduced as stuffed animals and the floor pillows made from keffiyehs.

Khalil grew up in Nigeria and the U.K. and returned to Lebanon when she was 18 to attend the American University of Beirut. After graduating with a degree in graphic design, she went to the School of Visual Arts in New York. Two years ago, she mounted a smaller show at Espace SD, in the experimental laboratory space, called "Wahad Areese, Please" ("A Husband, Please"), which happened to take place about a year after she ran the Beirut Marathon in a wedding dress (a performance piece, if you will, critiquing societal pressure on young Lebanese women to marry and marry quick) and right after she herself rather quietly and atypically married (for love, not status).

At that time, Khalil was wrestling with being back in Beirut after her time in New York and her work was tackling issues of gender and independence typical third-wave feminist themes. Now she's grappling more with politics, religion and spirituality.

"For the past two years I've been re-reading a lot of history. I'm older and more spiritual, and I've been rediscovering aspects of the war, particularly the religious element, and the differences between the spiritual and political use of religion."

Khalil's early experience of war-torn Lebanon came through weekly phone calls to her grandmother from Lagos and from regular summertime visits.

"I always felt alienated," she says. "I wanted to play hide and seek and my cousins wanted to build wooden guns and march down the street."

Back in Nigeria, her parents used to get VHS copies of comedy skits that parodied Lebanese politics, and colored Khalil's view of the country.

In addition to revisiting the war from an adult perspective, Khalil has been delving into religious scholarship. Coming from a Druze family, she describes her research as "a quest to understand my own religious background because it's so closed off. I wanted to find out how everything is connected. It makes me feel more human to know that everything goes back to one source."

Still, the religious and political iconography on view here is troubling for a number of reasons. One, Khalil focuses (without explanation or justification) on predominantly Shia imagery - as if to say that in her search for the break between the spiritual and political use of religion, Druze falls on one side and Shia Islam on the other. Two, what does the Iranian revolution have to do with militias fighting in Lebanon's civil war? Is she conflating the two based on the logic that if you squint they look the same? Three, there is a vexing lack of criticality in the show, forfeited to Khalil's love of gaudy decoration. And four, if she is going to make mock shrines out of all this old material, why not just go for it and bring the entire tear-down approach up to date? Why not throw Nasrallah and Fadlallah into one of those blinkery boxes, for example?

Those criticisms aside, "I Love You" is nonetheless impressive due to the wild celebration of Khalil's tactile skills. The materials she uses may be deliberately cheap, but her synthesis is rich in innovation and effort. Khalil had her entire studio kitted out with dry wall over the concrete so she could stretch her canvases directly on the walls and then mount them on frames after the works were complete. She is constantly experimenting with and refining her technique, not only in the application of paint but in stitching those soft sculptures and constructing those small, dazzlingly detailed box shrines.

"Process and repetition is such an important part of my work," she says. "It's manual labor but I like that at the end of the day my back starts to hurt, my feet start to hurt. I'm moving away from intellect toward a more creative offering. The point is to think less and make more. I work every day. Every day I'm in the studio. You have to if you want to be a working artist, not a hobbyist. I think the thing we are lacking most in the art world today is artists with skills."

Zena al-Khalil's "I Love You" is on view at Espace SD in Gemmayzeh through May 27. For more information, please call +961 1 563 114