Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present Beirut, a solo show by Lebanese- American photographer Manal Abu-Shaheen opening on Jan. 22, 2022 from 10am - 6pm at The Artist Room by Taymour Grahne Projects, 52 Lonsdale Road, as part of a socially distanced viewing across our 3 spaces.
Saturday January 22, 2022
Beirut, Manal Abu-Shaheen
10am - 6pm at The Artist Room: 52 Lonsdale Rd, W11 2DE
Still Going, Group Show Curated by 106 Green
10am- 6pm at Notting Hill: 1 Lonsdale Rd, W11 2BY
Windows, Craig Kucia
10am - 6pm at Holland Park: 10 Portland Rd, W11 4LA
As well as the physical show at The Artist Room, there will be a virtual component available below.
Online
https://art.kunstmatrix.com/apps/artspaces/dist/index.html?timestamp=1653401521268#/?external=true&splashscreen=true&language=en&uid=68806&exhibition=8785661
The Artist Room
Beirut features a selection of works from Manal Abu-Shaheen’s ongoing photographic series. Shot in the city where she was born, this series explores the advertising images, much of it western advertising, and real estate development that overlap with Beirut's halting attempts to rebuild after conflict.
Motivated by a lack of visual history of the landscape in Lebanon, Abu-Shaheen set out to construct her own photographic archive of contemporary Beirut — a cityscape dominated by advertising billboards purporting mythologized western ideals of luxury, pleasure, and excess that are incongruous in the post conflict city. For Abu- Shaheen, the advertisements and pervasive neo-liberal capital represent a contemporary form of colonialism. This under-documented place is occupied by images of a different place and people.
Viewed in retrospect with the knowledge of the complicated events of the past two years in Lebanon, these photographs describe a specific moment in the city’s trajectory. Advertising and urban construction were driving Beirut’s economy. A decade-long construction boom aided by foreign investments and neoliberal interest reshaped the landscape. As the economy collapsed in 2019, the disjunction between the city’s building projects, its lived architecture, and the billboards became a stark reminder of the failures of these mythologies to connect with Lebanon’s specific cultural and political context. Many of the spaces in Abu-Shaheen’s photographs were affected to varying degrees by the port explosion on August 4, 2020. Looking back now to the conditions prior to 2019, the photographs point to the unsustainability of the hyper development of the decade. Lately, empty billboards, destroyed luxury shops, and vandalized bank machines are common scenes across the city. Abu-Shaheen’s photographs chart relationships of time, history and place, while critically engaging the weight of the forces that produce systems of living in a postcolonial global environment.
Manal Abu-Shaheen (b. 1982, Beirut) is a Lebanese-American photographer currently living and working in the Bronx, NY. Her recent solo exhibitions include Mapping Utopia, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR (2021), 2d Skin, Soloway, Brooklyn, NY (2019), Theater of Dreams, Bernstein Gallery, Princeton University, NJ (2018) and Beta World City, LORD LUDD, Philadelphia, PA (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Beard & Weil Galleries, Wheaton College, MA (2021), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2020), Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury, NY (2019), The Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea (2017), Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2016), and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2015). She is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019), NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Photography (2019), Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant (2017), Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency (2016), A.I.R Gallery Fellowship (2016), and Artist in the Marketplace Residency at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2015). Abu-Shaheen holds a B.A from Sarah Lawrence College and M.F.A in Photography from Yale School of Art. She teaches at The City College of New York.
