Sana Gallery, located at 12 Blair Road in Singapore, is South-East Asia’s first Contemporary Middle Eastern Art gallery. The gallery will be opening with a week-long launch from 25 October 2012 culminating in a private event on 1 November.
Sana Gallery serves as a platform for new images and ideas about the Middle East – presenting exciting Middle Eastern talent to clients and partners in Singapore, South East Asia, India and
China. The gallery's projects include exhibitions anchored around artists’ commissions, installations, artists’ talks and performances. The gallery will also be offering a residence in Singapore for emerging artists - immersing themselves in the vibrant local and regional culture and benefiting from the deep resources available to art and artists in Singapore and in South East Asia - to create career-defining commissions, relevant in the permanent discourse of the Middle East with the world.
The Middle East is undergoing an era of unprecedented upheaval, often referred to as the Arab Spring. From Morocco to Iran, societies are in the midst of wrenching transformations. Art and politics have historically had a strong relationship, with upheavals in particular unleashing powerful creative forces. The contemporary art scene has been flourishing in the Middle East, and it is being bolstered by the extraordinary political, social and economic changes under way. These creative forces, now in full bloom, are producing an exciting new wave of contemporary art, in countries as varied as Libya, Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, the Gulf Arab countries, Yemen and Iran. Artists are bearing witness to the transformational evolution of Middle Eastern societies, in some cases influencing politics in their own right. The Arab Spring is young and it is but a phase in a long process of change in the Middle East.
Sana Gallery anticipates that the explosive creativity everyone is witnessing across the Middle East will endure for decades, as the Arab Spring evolves and metamorphoses.
Sana Gallery's debut exhibition will feature the work of artists Thaer Maarouf and Semaan Khawam.
Born in Shabha, Syria in 1972, Thaer Maarouf explores in his series of paintings the limits of ‘seeing’. His exhibited body of work includes paintings portraying concealed human figures and faces behind layers of longitudinal lines or trickled with tiny Jasmine flowers. In these paintings, we look through those thin lines to a reality intentionally blurred by the artist, as if to say that we do not really see or that we cannot realistically convey the historical and almost always violent images that we are bombarded with daily in the news. His installation, “Veto,” speaks to the emotional scars of a people in the midst a civil war and contrasts these with the inadequacy of our international political architecture.
Semaan Khawam, who has both Syrian and Lebanese origins, was born in 1974 and has been living in Beirut since his teenage years. With this new body of work, Khawam somehow draws a possible route back to the country he left. In his paintings and stencil work, he seeks to explore the human and societal consequences of the events occurring in Syria with a technique bursting with subtle elements drawn from his graffiti art and poetry practices. The artist is interested in working through portraiture to reveal the dramatic reconfiguration of families in the aftermath of the massacres and violent events taking place in Syria. His paintings depict abstract human figures, destitute of any characteristics, shadowy beings. He represents children playing, holding flowers and jumping rope; all of them blackened, their human features effaced.
This exhibition lays bare Thaer Maarouf and Semaan Khawam’s desire to speak with a distinct voice through their art, a powerful representation of the recurring human themes of freedom, injustice, pain and joy.
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