Hiba Kalache
The new maps are wrong and no one dares to speak up. my neighbor took 320 meters of my land and built on it without my permission | 2019
Acrylic on carton. 50 x 35 cm. From the series "Encounters - Ongoing"
The series of drawings, 'Encounters – Ongoing' stems from chance meetings on leisurely road trips around the mountains of Lebanon. The drawings act as markers of my conversations with landowners, farmers, and people directly working in the fields. The formal particularities of drawing, and specifically the use of ink washes, allows for an approach that is both intuitive and intentional. This approach reproduces the spontaneity of these accidental or brief exchanges with people who have a vested interest in Lebanese land. Each conversation is represented by a simple tree branch, or a fragment of a (flowering) plant, belonging to the site and moment the encounter took place. This fragment indexes an encounter in which the farmer's story, experience, or relationship to the land and its borders was shared. Excerpts from our exchanges are also hand-written in Arabic on the picture plane. In the directness of the creative process, and the abstraction of the conversations, this project alludes to, and yet blurs, the sectarian divisions upon which the ownership of land is based, as well as a present geopolitical context. What I share is the marking of unplanned encounters through the representations of fragmented personal accounts along specific terrains and borders.
Reference HK-WP-2019-C
Biography of the artist
Born in Beirut. 1972
Works and Lives in between San Francisco and Beirut
Hiba Kalache is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, sculpture and interactive projects. Kalache draws on her daily life for her materials, process and content. She interrogates the separation between the private and public spheres, and more specifically, what she calls, “the banality of daily rituals”.
Her recent interests include female desire and the abject in relation to truth, and the possibility of positing futurity in an era of perpetual presentism.
In 2005, Kalache received a Master of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She has since exhibited in Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Istanbul, New Orleans, Oakland, San Jose (USA), San Francisco, Tehran, Athens, London and Paris. Her work has also been shown at art fairs including Art Dubai, Drawing Now (Paris), and Gwangju Art (South Korea).
Kalache’s recent exhibitions include "Encounters" – ongoing (2020) at The Upper Gallery at Saleh Barakat Gallery,
"Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite" (2018), a solo exhibition curated by Natasha Gasparian at Saleh Barakat Gallery, "Mimesis Expression Construction" (2016) curated by Octavian Esanu at the American University of Beirut’s Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, "Heartland" (2015) curated by Joanna Chevalier at the Beirut Exhibition Center, and "Under Construction, Exposure" (2014) curated by Marie Muracciole at the Beirut Art Center. In 2012, she had solo shows in Beirut with The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, and the FFA Private Bank. In 2017, she taught fine arts at the Lebanese American University.
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