Green Art Gallery is hosting a group exhibition in collaboration with Selma Feriani Gallery. Founded in 2013 in Tunis (Tunisia), it represents emerging and mid-career artists from the MENA region and across the world. The show features seven artists: Nazgol Ansarinia, Rossella Biscotti, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Elena Damiani, Yazid Oulab, and Massinissa Selmani. It will be open to the public until 17 February 2024.
About the participants
Nazgol Ansarinia (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran), who lives and works in her hometown, employs sculpture, video, drawing, installation, and 3D printed models to explore the systems and experiences shaping contemporary Iranian life. The themes she has covered include security policy, control and discipline, international politics, and media. The artist has also addressed such issues as Iran’s water crisis, pollution, urban development in Tehran, and Iranian architecture in general.
Rossella Biscotti (b. 1978, Molfetta, Italy), whose practice incorporates filmmaking, performance, and sculpture, focuses on social and political events that happened in the past and become the starting point for the investigation of individual or collective identity and memory. At the core of Biscotti’s work is a thorough research into archival materials (found documents, audio recordings, or newspapers) documenting these events. She employs archive materials to highlight the loss of information, the ambiguity of reconstructions, and their possible uses.
M’barek Bouhchichi (b. 1975, Akka, Morocco) resides in Tahanaout (Morocco). Using painting, sculpture, drawing, and video, his visual language is based on exploring the limits between the individual discourse and its extension towards broader social, poetic, and historical systems. His work lies at the intersection between the aesthetic and the social, delving into associated fields as possibilities for self-definition.
Terracotta and engobe. 35 x 426 x 3 cm
Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (b. 1984, Istanbul, Turkey), a multidisciplinary artist based in her hometown, produces sculptures, drawings, films, and site-specific interventions. She explores the themes of absence and invisibility, identity, memory, space, and time. Büyüktaşcıyan particularly focuses on the concept of the other, using metaphors from local myths as well as historic and iconographic elements. Recently, the artist has been questioning the meaning of absence within the collective memory and addressing urban transformation.
Elena Damiani (b. 1979, Lima, Peru) lives and works in Lima. Her practice and research are informed by the conceptual significance of archives. Her collages, sculptures, videos, and installations she creates using found materials explore the politics of space and memory. The artist often depicts landscapes and buildings, which she marks as sites of loneliness and desolation. In her art, Damiani raises questions about legacy and place concerning monuments and the built environment.
45 x 36 x 3.5 cm framed.
Yazid Oulab (b. 1958, Sedrata, Algeria) has been living in Marseilles (France) since 1988. Through his diverse artworks (installations, sculptures, drawings, and videos), he returns to the origins of writing, numbers, spirituality, and religion. Influenced by the issues related to Western Art, Oulab’s work draws from a literary and poetic tradition and can be regarded as a quest for meaning. His art bridges feeling and symbolism, symbol and text, and craft and ritual.
Plant oil and graphite Bristol paper. 58 x 44 cm
Massinissa Selmani (b. 1980, Algiers, Algeria) divides his time between Tours (France) and Tizi-Ouzou (Algeria). Although drawing is his main medium of choice, he also creates short animations, installations, and sculptures. Selmani’s humorous artworks often depict strange scenes unlikely to happen in reality, presenting the absurdity of human behaviour, and address various contemporary and political issues.
To learn more about the exhibition, please visit its official web page.
You might also be interested in visiting the Vantage Point Sharjah 11 group show.
