Athr Gallery is proud to present Yorghos Kontaxis (d. March 2010): A Tribute. With a BFA in Photography, Kontaxis enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a photographer, screenwriter, and filmmaker. During his 37 years of art practice, Kontaxis’ work was shown in more than 25 solo and 15 group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Greece. He was best known for his award-winning and poignant portraiture of his native Greece, and the local color of New York’s Coney Island. Kontaxis also worked with directors Sergio Leone and Alan Parker and producer Dino De Laurentis as a production-still photographer for movies and television. In 1985, his own short film, Stamford Through the Eyes of an Artist, aired on Connecticut Public Television. Kontaxis was head of the photography department at the Stamford Museum in Connecticut from 1975 until 2004, when he retired to his home country of Greece. He died in Athens, Greece, on March 1, 2010, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at the age of 63.
In his second solo exhibition at Green Art Gallery Dubai, Syrian photographer Jaber Al Azmeh will be presenting a series of new photographic duets, exploring the dual and complex relationship between human beings and time. The photographic works, which the artist views as portraits are, however, mysteriously lacking in human content. Instead, the main subjects consist of empty rusting oil barrels, derelict buildings and walls, tires and abandoned cars — a junkyard utopia. Through substituting inanimate objects with the human being, Al Azmeh’s works in actuality investigate the intensely intimate stories of the people who passed through his “frame.” The viewer is presented with a scene similar to that of an incriminating investigation that has long been abandoned. With what feels like chalked-out silhouettes of missing people, all that is left of the human being are random clues leading up to his trace.
On June 4, Ayyam Gallery Damascus will proudly present the solo show of Holland-based Iraqi artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji. Marking his debut exhibition with Ayyam Gallery since first joining its lineup of artists earlier this year, this forthcoming event will feature several new large-scale works. Created as part of his recent “Waiting for Godot” series, these lambda prints are a continuation of Alfraji’s exploration of philosophical and existential themes. A visual artist, print maker and designer, Alfraji blends art and philosophy as a means of expanding the formulistic and conceptual boundaries of his aesthetic. His imposing multimedia compositions explore a variety of themes, including everything from the universal human condition to experiences of exile and fragmentation.
Lahd Gallery is proud to announce the premier of our first pop art exhibition featuring a Kuwaiti pop art duo, HamadAlSaab and Ali Sultan. Presenting the Arab culture and history through their own contemporary vision, both Hamad and Ali believe that although pop icons around the world have transcended their time to become symbols of popular heritage and national pride, their works will reflect Arab culture in a modern and internationally accessible way. For Hamad and Ali, pop art is their way of expressing the emotions that they associate with their glamorous past, present and future. Their new approach of using celebrity icons from the Middle East to cast their own interpretation of the world and the current issues surrounding the region by using these icons to play out these messages is undoubtedly effective and we are all the more reminded of the arabesque motives and celebrities that made their glamorous past shine.
Traffic is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions running alongside one another: “Relate to the Matter As I Drop the Bomb” by UBIK in Gallery I and “Reign of the Shah” by Bilal Aquil in Gallery II. In Gallery I, Dubai-based artist UBIK examines the recent socio-political shift in the MENA region. He explores the optimism of the “new wave social media 9-5 weekday anarchists” who seem to promote a sense of optimism that is both convenient and skeptical. In his own words, "suddenly everyone's a political pundit in this new world diss-order!" In Gallery II, Bilal Aquil narrates a story of the assassination of a Shah of the Imperial Court and the subsequent battles that follow to avenge his death and establish the power of the new Shah. He draws on inspiration from the elaborately illustrated Persian manuscript, the “Shahnameh” (the “Book of Kings”), that tells the story of Iran through the seventh-century Arab/Islamic conquest of the Sassanid dynasty. Written by Persian poet Ferdowsi, the “Shahnameh” preserves the identity of the Persian culture with epics of love, war, battles and kingship.
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