Interview with Lamia Joreige

01/08/16

Interview: Lamia Joreige

Lamia Joreige (b1972) is a visual artist and film-maker who grew up in Lebanon during the civil war (1975-1990). She makes work about her own and others’ experiences, creating a new collective history, aside from the one presented in the media. Using archival documents and oral histories, she interrogates the notion of truth and explores the aftermath of war in her city, Beirut.

In 2011, Joreige’s work Objects of War [No 1 to 4, 1999-2006], a series of video testimonials and personal possessions, was the first major piece of Lebanese art to be acquired by the Tate Collection.

Joreige is one of seven artists to have been selected to show in the Artes Mundi 7 exhibition (21 October 2016 – 26 February 2017), the UK’s leading international contemporary art prize, from which a winner will be selected in January 2017, to receive £40,000, the UK’s largest monetary prize awarded to an artist. In the run-up to the exhibition in Cardiff (jointly held at the National Museum Cardiff and Chapter art galley, Cardiff), Joreige explained some of the concepts behind her work in a Skype call from Beirut.

Read this interview here

Review of Akram Zaatari: On Photography People and Modern Times at Thomas Dane Gallery

20/01/14

Akram Zaatari: On Photography People and Modern Times

Thomas Dane Gallery

27 November 2013 - 1 February 2014

With the advent of the selfie and, before that, amateur photography, the studio portrait has become more and more a thing of the past. Once, however, it was an essential part of the visual vernacular. For nearly 50 years, from 1953, Hashem al-Madani ran a photographic studio, Studio Sheherazade, in Saïda, South Lebanon. Working from seven a.m. until midnight, seven days a week, and charging just seven cents per photograph, Madani finally earned enough money to send his sons to study in the USA. Simultaneously, he became Saïda’s leading photographer, amassing an archive of some 500,000 images, and, by his own estimate, photographing 90% of the city’s population.

His studio was a place where people could escape from everyday life – and, latterly, the horrors of civil war – and enjoy the freedom to dress up and become someone else, or, simply, to relax and become themselves. Madani was not just a portrait photographer, but also an artist, and the images he made preserve their subjects’ individuality; they document an era, a city and its people.

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2014/01/akram-zaatari/