31 August 2015

BEIRUT: Amanda Abi Khalil is in Warsaw at the moment preparing to mount Dust. She and Anna Ptak are co-curating this show (kurz in Polish, ghubar in Arabic) at Warsaws Ujazdowski Castle, home of the citys Centre for Contemporary Art (CSW).

Dust (bits of skin, clothing and various bodily and environmental excretions) doesnt figure in all the works this show. The exhibitions curatorial statement suggests that its participating artists were selected because their work interacts with the surrounding environment.

Dust is ubiquitous, Ptak and Abi Khalil note in their curatorial statement, and wonder whether this ubiquity suggests dust could become the substance for a universal language.

It is everywhere and can become everything, they write, though dust has a slightly different resonance in various languages.

The Arabic-Persian ghobar evokes desert sands and the dust-clogged air of the cities. The Polish kurz suggests the everlasting work of eliminating dust and its constant recreation. In English usage, dust reflects a small particle on the verge of visibility, a mental bit and non-material entity.

Abi Khalil and Ptak have gone so far as to incorporate the dust of Ujazdowski Castle into the exhibition architecture.

Were using leftovers, recycling remnants of past exhibitions and sets, Abi Khalil said. Its going to seem like a messy exhibition.

The curators have used the diverse associations ascribed to dust to build an elaborate program in which the exhibition is complemented by a series of site-specific commissions, artist residencies, performances, discussions and film screenings involving writers and activists as well as artists.

The exhibition itself promises to be a sprawling affair, comprised of work by 22 artists, several of whom are Lebanese and artists who reside in Beirut Caline Aoun, Vartan Avakian, Charbel-Joseph Hajj-Boutros, Ali Cherri, Mireille Kassar, Monira Al Qadiri and Lorde Selys.

Avakian will unveil a work especially commissioned for this show, one springing from his interest in public monuments. The power of a public monument, he argues in his artist statement, lies in the scale of residue it generates. Its power emanates from this residue, from this dust soil, pollen, fibres, shed skin cells, hair, tears and sweat.

With his Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust series, the artist encapsulates the aura of monuments in natural sculptural forms, crystallised minerals refined from water taken from the monuments.

For this new commission, Pa?ac Kultury i Nauki, Avakians chosen monument is Warsaws Palace of Culture and Science, PKiN, the tallest building in Poland, which was gifted to the Polish people by Soviet leader Josef Stalin, a provenance that makes it one of the more controversial structures on the citys skyline.

His crystal sculptures have been derived from the structures pipes and drainage systems, and the residues of environmental and human pollutants accumulated there over the decades.

The artist will also show 2014s Burj Khalifa, also from Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust, whose crystals were refined from Burj Khalifa Lake, the artificial body of water created to frame one of the worlds tallest buildings.

Avakian will also show his 2014 piece Study for a Self-Portrait, a miniature carpet that lists its media as including meteorite particles, shed hair, dead skin and other biological debris on fiber. Collected from the artists body, they seem an appropriate media for self-portraiture.

Other Lebanese and Beirut artists with works on show in Dust include Mireille Kassar, who will show pieces from her landscape studies (2009-12).

Charbel-Joseph Hajj- Boutros will show three pieces. His 2013 1 cm3 of infinite darkness, is a clever work that encloses mirrors within a sealed wooden cube, effectively preventing light from reaching the mirrors.

Hajj- Boutros nine-minute video Filming the air, the Netherlands, Belgium, 2014, and the installation Mixed Water Lebanon, Israel, 2013, are studies of sameness in defiance of the national borders separating nation states.

Beirut-based Lorde Selys, who is these days a resident artist at Ujazdowski Castle, has been invited to make a filmic contribution to the exhibition. Its called Dust on the Typewriter, Abi Khalil said. Its not just a documentary of the mounting of the exhibition. Its a filmic dialogue with the works on show.

Selys will be aiming to contract the para-activities comprising the creation of the exhibition into one sculptural gesture from the position of an artist-reporter-filmmaker.

Ali Cherri will also unveil a new commission during Dust, one that shares Avakians interest in monumentality as well as dust.

The multimedia installation Monument to Dust, 2015, springs from the artists interest in catastrophe and surviving a catastrophe and, more immediately, his 2014 residency at the CCAs A-I-R Laboratory.

Struck by the number of monuments embedded in Warsaws urban fabric to mark the citys past glories, he decided to create a work that celebrates a transitional moment.

Working with a photograph of a still-bereft Warsaw, shot in 1945, the installation projects the image upon a sand basin a screen in constant movement. Reminiscent of an aerial view of a city, the work provides a birds-eye view of Warsaw. Above, an owl watches.

kurz / dust / ghubar opens Sept. 4 at 6 p.m. with a concert by improve duo Praed (Paed Conca and Raed Yassin). The show runs through 15 Nov. For more information on the show see www.csw.art.pl.

Copyright The Daily Star 2015.