Gabriella Choueifaty
WORKS
2006 (2018–2024)
When you fall
In love 2022
Mixed media installation
Forty-one chromogenic prints on wood panel
Variable dimensions
Presented as part of collective exhibition Imagine That Tomorrow (In Between Festival, Beirut, 2022)
EXHIBITION TEXT:
The leitmotif goes: there is no future here.A photographer’s usual gesture is one of conservation; preserving an image of the now for a time to come, especially in a city like Beirut, destroyed a thousand times, full of places you can’t remember but did not forget.
After the blast, we would walk down the streets to look at rubble that was no longer building,
to look at shattered glass that were no longer window.
The contours of any object were no more and everything was intertwined, merging into each other, formless, meaningless atoms of shapes and colours, pure perception divested from any reference nor signification.
We could not do anything with this spectacular landscape, except look at it, and clean it up, like we did.
Nonetheless, it seemed like this image stayed glued onto our eyes and as hard as we shake, it does not rub off.
In this thick darkness where we stand, let us be attentive to this shift in our perception.
After the incommensurable and the intolerable happens a withdrawal of meaning.
An impossibility to explain, understand or make sense of such violence that is not solved by a factual sequence of the event.
The incomprehension lingers.
What is darkness, if not the plane that keeps from falling the floating colours that we overlook?
For the last two years, I have produced images that spark from darkness and its multiple shades. This gesture is not a search for meaning but merely a liberation of it; and as all my words are borrowed and I have too many times been left speechless; I learn again how to express myself by looking for colours in between the black and the white.
Maybe, later on; far, far away in time, these shapes, colours and lines will be deciphered retrospectively by generations to come.
But in this time of disorientation, it is maybe not anymore, our task as artists to assert meaning, but simply to invite - insight - to observe more intensely
How things look like now.
The creation of these images was accompanied by a quiet feeling of being scattered, shattered, dispersed, distracted; an unbearable lightness, impossibility to feel anchored, centered, or to remain in place, always running away from an unknown and obscure threat, caught in a fast and slow spiral, just like the way
my feet were not touching the ground
when I was falling
in love.
Gabriella Choueifaty
2022