TRACES > Group Exhibition Featuring work on PAPER > June 19th - July 18th @LawrieShabibi

Nadia Kaabi-Line, Baruther Strasse, 2008

In the physical sense, traces can be visible marks left on a surface. There is also an historical and cultural sense. Our forthcoming exhibition Traces brings together the works of four artists, Nadia Kaabi Linke, Marwan Sahmarani, Selma Gürbüz and Shahpour Pouyan, highlighting their work on paper and explores how the intrinsic and associative qualities of the medium affects their work.

In today’s world when writing can be done on a keyboard and sketches made onscreen, paper can seem like an odd survival from an earlier age. The permanence of a mark of ink on paper sheet, which can only be written on once, seems to contradict the perceived fragility of the medium. Yet the very traits that make paper seem an anachronism in comparison to other media are also its strengths: they bequeath it a timeless and evocative quality. Once a trace is laid on to the paper, it can hardly be erased. Paper works cannot be over-worked or worked over. They tread a careful line between forward planning and spontaneous execution.

Selma Gurbuz, Sun Lonely Bride, 2013

Paper is indelibly associated with books and the dissemination of knowledge. From its origins in China more than 2000 years ago, to its westward progression through Middle East and on to medieval Europe, through industrialization, until the internet revolution of recent decades, paper was the primary medium of record.

In the Middle East until modern times paper was also a main medium for representation, with miniatures and diagrams, their strong graphic quality quite unlike easel painting on canvas. This abstract quality lends itself well to a contemporary context, as Marwan Sahramani’s paintings of comical militaristic figures on an almost translucent paper and Selma Gürbüz’s whimsical paintings on a coarser surface attest. Both recall miniatures but in quite different ways- Sahmarani with his finely wrought details embellishing gestural washes of colour, while Gürbüz works appear almost as illustrations emancipated from some giant apocryphal manuscript.

Shahpour Pouyan, V2 - 3, 2013

Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s Baruther Strasse, an imprint on paper taken from the surface of a wall, is from her ongoing project that highlights historically or symbolically significant walls in Berlin and Tunis. Linking recent history to a more distant past, the wall in question is from a 19th century unplanned graveyard in Berlin which gradually developed into fully fledged cemetery when wealthier families began to build tombs and crypts, which eventually formed an imposing wall around the compound, which reminds Kaabi-Linke of how empty spaces around Berlin were occupied by squatters during the 1980s and 1990s.

Recent works by Shahpour Pouyan extend his commentary on power and domination. As an artist well-versed in the conventions of the Persian miniature, paradoxically his move to paper as a medium sees him downplay overt references to the genre, instead exploring the graphic qualities of the medium. His recent series of drawings on paper are on a grand scale, singling out particular objects whose images captivate him, treating them like devotional images or oversized illustrations from an architectural treatise or scientific manual. Post Hot Point is an amalgam of golden mosque-like dome and Capitol-like white rotunda, while the V2 series depicts the engine of a V2 rocket, an early ballistic missile produced by Germany at the latter part of the Second World War using forced concentration camp labour. Werner Von Brauhn, the designer of this rocket, was later captured by American soldiers and brought to the US to work on its space programme. In the process he became an American hero with his successful Apollo moon landings. Pouyan dwells on the unfamiliar shape of the engine rather than the rocket itself.

About Nadia Kaabi-Linke
Nadia Kaabi-Linke was born in Tunis in 1978 to a Russian mother from Kiev and a Tunisian father. She lived in many countries including, such as Ukraine, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and France . She studied in the Academy of Fine Arts in Tunis, and later in Paris she combined her artistic work with philosophy and sciences of art. She accomplished her scientific research in artistic poeïtics, which focused the subject "The Invisible and the Pictorial Emergence of the Surface in Installation-Paintings" with the degree of a PhD at the Sorbonne University of Paris in 2008.

Solo exhibitions include No One Harms Me, Experimenter, Kolkata, 2013; Black Is The New White, Lawrie Shabibi, 2012, Tatort, Christian Hosp, Berlin, 2010. She has shown in group shows in Tunis, Cairo, London as well as participating in the Liverpool Biennial, 2012, 'The Future of a Promise' (the first Pan-Arab Pavilion) at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, the 9th Sharjah Biennale in 2009 and the 25th Alexandria Biennale in 2009. In 2011 she was one of the recipients of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize where her work "Flying Carpets" was exhibited at Art Dubai, 2011. She lives and works in Tunis and Berlin.

About Selma Gürbüz
Selma Gürbüz was born in Istanbul in 1960. She studied for her BA in Fine Art at the Exeter College of Art Design in the UK (1980-82) and at the Marmara University School of Fine Arts in Turkey (1982-84). She has exhibited extensively both in Turkey and abroad and is one of Turkey’s best-known contemporary artists.
Recent solo shows include Long Night. Faraway Voyages, Rampa, Istanbul, 2013; Mind’s Eye, Lawrie Shabibi, 2012; Shadows of My Self with Rose Issa Projects at Leighton House, 2011; “Aketip” (“Archetypes”), Antrepo no.3, Istanbul (2010); “Uninvited”, Akbank Culture Center, Istanbul 2009.

About Marwan Sahramani
Born in Lebanon in 1970, Sahramani currently lives and works in Beirut. With an archetypal biography specific to his generation, he left Lebanon in 1989 and moved to Paris to study at l'École Supérieur d'Art Graphique. He has had solo exhibitions in Beirut, London, Montreal and Dubai and group exhibitions in Washington and Mexico. His works have also featured in 'Told/ Untold /Retold' at Mathaf, Doha (2010), 'All about Beirut' at Kunsthalle whiteBOX, Munich (2010) and the 'The Feast of the Damned' at the Museum of Art and Design, New York (2010). In 2010 Sahmarani was the recipient of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize and his work 'The Feast of the Damned' was showcased at Art Dubai that year.

About Shahpour Pouyan
Shahpour Pouyan was born in 1979 in Isfahan, Iran and is currently studying for a Masters of Fine Art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He has a Masters in Fine Art (Painting) from Tehran University of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) from the University of Science and Culture. Pouyan is the recipient of the Tehran Contemporary Museum of Art's grant of residence at International Cite Des Artes, Paris, France and has exhibited in various solo exhibitions in Tehran and Dubai and in group shows in Paris, New York, Beirut, Canada and Serbia. Solo shows include Full Metal Jacket, Lawrie Shabibi, 2011.