Gallery Isabelle is currently hosting Personal Sea, an exhibition featuring works by Lebanese artist and filmmaker Mahmoud El Safadi. On view is a series of miniature paintings, in which the Mediterranean is transformed into a site of memory, inheritance, and continuity. The show will be open to the public until 2 November 2025.
Through the Personal Sea series, El Safadi seeks to inhabit the perspective of his late grandfather, who served under the British flag in the Eastern Mediterranean between 1939 and 1946. His service coincided with the enforcement of the 1939 White Paper, which restricted Zionist migration to Palestine and reshaped the sea as a militarised zone of empire, conflict, and displacement. Having spoken little of these years, El Safadi’s grandfather left behind silences that the artist approaches through archival fragments, speculative painting, and inherited memory.
El Safadi’s connection to the Mediterranean is refracted through its present condition: a littoral world that is connective and exclusionary, communal and privatised, fluid and heavily patrolled. Painted on playing cards recalling quatorze, a game his grandfather once taught him, the images accumulate into a visual palimpsest that binds the personal to the geopolitical, the intimate to the historical. In doing so, Personal Sea situates remembrance and belonging within the wider tides of struggle, surveillance, and passage.
About the artist
Mahmoud El Safadi (b.1987, Beirut, Lebanon) earned a BFA in Film and New Media History from York University (Toronto, Canada) in 2010; he also took part in the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan (Beirut, 2014-15).
El Safadi’s multidisciplinary practice, which encompasses video, photography, sculpture, and installation, draws from personal histories of migration and displacement. Through it, he examines how movement across borders shapes identity, memory, and the poetics of belonging. His work often blurs distinctions between nature and culture, material and lived heritage, the natural and the artificial. His hybrid forms act as gestures of resistance, interrogating dominant narratives, cultural and economic imperialism, and the contradictions of globalisation as a connective and divisive force.
El Safadi’s art pieces have been showcased in various exhibitions, which include Fine Print (Beirut Art Center, 2022); Pattison Outdoor Billboard Public Art Project, Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver, Canada, 2021); March Projects (Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, 2017); and the 4th Aflam International Festival of Arab Cinema (Marseille, France, 2016), among others.
To get more information about Personal Sea, please visit the exhibition’s official web page.
You might also be interested in attending The Imaginary Museum and New Western Views (Preview) by Marwan Bassiouni.
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