In 2004, in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag considers a question posed by Virginia Wolfe’s 1938 reflection on the roots of war, Three Guineas: "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Separated by more than sixty years of history and technological advancement, both women considered whether photographs documenting the atrocities of war could be an effective vehicle to prevent future violence.

In 2020, an explosion of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in the capital city of Lebanon marked one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history. In the chaos that descended upon Beirut in the aftermath of the explosion, Hiba Kalache made the decision to leave her family home for the fourth time. Returning to San Francisco, where she earned her Masters of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2005, she set up a studio and returned to work, insistent upon processing this latest chapter of violence through her paintings.

Trying to make sense of the cycles of war that led to her displacement, she churned through diverse sources: the writing of Susan Sontag, the poetry of Etel Adnan and the history of art, delving into a study of Islamic miniatures. Reveling in the color and detail of the forms, the familiar patterns of the calligraphy resonated with the gestures that kept appearing in her own work. The vivid blues and yellows that represent prophesy and divinity in the miniature tradition inflected the new paintings that seemed to erupt out of her with an urgency and forcefulness: a will to survive.

The exhibition title, ‘belliphonic,’ comes from Martin Daughtry’s term referring to the vast array of sounds that are created by conflict; not only weaponry, but motorized vehicles, sirens, generators, even the propaganda that fills the air in the wake of an insurrection. Kalache’s body carries these sounds just as she has carried new life in her womb.

Something of the belliphonic is translated through the act of painting, the memory of a sound inflecting her hand. But there is also a refusal to submit, to collapse in the wake of tragedy.

The paintings are abstract, but they attempt to depict something of the moment we find ourselves in today. They are both an act of protest and an attempt at escape. They look for beauty and rebirth in the explosion of blossoms spilling over a casket. They collapse time, pulling from historical references, grasping for answers to unanswerable questions, and challenging us to move forward with empathy and find connection through our shared humanity.

Kalache’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon and The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, Beirut, Lebanon. Group exhibitions include Beiteddine Palace, Beit ed-Dine, Lebanon; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France; Villa Romana, Florence, Italy; Beit Beirut Museum and Urban Cultural Center, Beirut, Lebanon; Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; The Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium; California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA.

For more information please contact Altman Siegel at [email protected] or 415-576-9300.

---

Our Dreams are a Second Life

Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut - Lebanon

Solo Exhibit 2020 - 2021

[…] the function of the human foot consists in giving firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud (the big toe, ceasing to grasp branches, is applied to the ground on the same plane as the other toes). But whatever the role played in the erection by his foot, man, who has a light head, in other words, a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, sees it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud.

– George Bataille, "The Big Toe” (1929)

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.

– George Bataille, The Solar Anus (1927–1930)

In Our Dreams are a Second Life, Hiba Kalache presents a ragingly luminescent body of work that extends the themes and gestures of her recent practice in a new installation of paintings, drawings, and a sculptural intervention. The majority of the works on paper are framed, while most of the paintings are unmounted and unstretched. The tension between the framed drawings and the unstretched paintings serves to highlight the fragile, intimate, and intuitive writerly gesture that distinguishes all of Kalache’s artwork. Produced in a period of protracted sociohistorical and existential crises, this recent work is consonant with the times, even if only obliquely so. The show does not provide an overarching narrative, but it exposes our ambivalent desires toward present reality – at once a fantasy and a living nightmare. This ambivalence is evocative of the relationship between the sexual and the political.

Desire in Kalache’s work is figured in motifs and visions of erotic excess. Lines charge with bloodied reds and curve into tumescent bulges, some indefinite and others defined: belly, breast, cock, toe, thigh, anus, and eye. Her objects are partial, and of the order of the fetish: now you see them, now you don’t. The work gratifies the prurient and prudish viewer alike; the former disavows the abjectness of the deformed female body with multiple pregnant bellies and instead sees free-floating partial objects of another kind, while the latter sees neither body nor organs. Oscillating between automatism and intention, her brushstrokes conjure up exuberant rays of sunshine (in I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives), leaky white jism (in these were not ungraspable dreams but a frenzy of living hours. and in these fluid hours I witnessed wondrous things), and smears of excrement (in something buoyant pressing up, insisting on existence, like the birth of a poem or a small volcano erupting). The sublime intermingles with the base to give way to a beauty that is not ideal but eroticized.

The toe, as prime évocateur of the base, is of particular importance in Kalache’s recent work. It is one of the exhibition’s central motifs as well as a condition of viewership. "The big toe”, remarks Georges Bataille, "is the most human part of the human body”. It is the element that differentiates the human from the ape, as the former relies on it for firm grounding and an upright posture, while the latter still uses it to cling to branches. In contrast to the ape, the human has "raised [herself] straight up in the air like a tree”. The distance assumed from the feet by the human head and sensory organs imbues the toe with associations of dirt and ugliness – the head is now seemingly but illusorily closer to the divine and further from the odorous regions of the human body. In Our Dreams are a Second Life, the works are situated at levels both high and low within the space and are to be seen from erect, stooped, and squatted positions. These three positions suggested by the placement of the works rely on the big toe for stability but two of them bring the head closer to the feet. The foot, which is the condition of the uprightness of the viewer, is deprecated as base. At the same time, it has a seductive appeal and is fetishized precisely because of its baseness and occasional deformations.

This is arguably most pronounced in a lot of rough things happened, begetting things even more terrible. On the unstretched canvas, several legs and feet clearly come into view. Two legs in particular hover on the picture plane as if in midair, one in the center with a downward facing foot and the other extending along the length of the right edge of the painting (in the latter, foot and thigh uncomfortably double as hand and arm). The striking red polish adorning the toenails of the first foot in the center is fetching to the viewer. It soon becomes apparent, though, that the varnish is (also) blood seeping from underneath the nails which horrifically colors the toes. The hesitant lines connecting the foot to the leg suggest something even more terrible – a broken leg where shin and calf are swapped. What was briefly beautiful now appears deformed. The toes (or hands) of the other foot (or arm) are even more strange. The little and ring toes are stunted, and the nail of the middle toe is chipped and bloody. Stretched out wide apart, the toes fail to plant the foot on stable ground. The struggle for grounding is further animated by charcoal-like streaks of street dirt beaming as if from the toes. Kalache wiped the dirty streets with her canvases during the months-long uprising beginning on October 17, 2019, and the resulting marks were later blended with charcoal and colored inks.

Our Dreams are a Second Life is marked by a fundamental ambiguity between the whole and the part, the ideal and the base, the political and the sexual. This ambiguity exposes the ambivalence at the core of desire, not least that of the viewer. Does desire diagnose the problem or offer solutions? The magnified ambivalence of desire in the artist’s recent work does not serve the exultant claim that the sexual is political; it points to its inverse, that the political is sexual. Consider the tag graffitied on the walls of Beirut last year: "Sex is good, but have you ever fucked the system?” In the tag, as much as in Kalache’s work, the question remains: How does one fuck the system?

Natasha Gasparian

---

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite

Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut - Lebanon

Solo Exhibit 2018

 

"I must also write to you because you harvest discursive words and not the directness of my painting. I know that my phrases are crude, I write them with too much love, and that love makes up for their faults, but too much love is bad for the work."

– Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector

"As when we are in love (another of Lispector's most basic motifs), we are constantly seduced and tortured by language, by doubts about the sincerity of the other, about reliability and meaning, by what the very language that we use to express our love, our sense of being and identity, leads us to hope for and desire, by the seductive but maddening skein of signifiers and signifieds that this language dangles eternally before us."

– Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector, Earl E. Fitz

Hiba Kalache draws in her painting and she writes with her brush. Her gestures are vigorous yet intricate, scribbly à la Twombly. Her practice is one ofécriture. To use Roland Barthes’ now-old French neologism, her painting is scriptible: its hermeneutic, symbolic, historic, and semic codes open up to an indeterminacy in the reading of both her work and its own textual references. Grand in scale, layered and ambiguous, it does not reaffirm what is mythologized. There is no singular unity in its composition, no universe that is total or whole. Kalache’s work demands a reception that is both distant and intimate, and in return, it promises jouissanceakin, and yet antithetical to divine rapture.

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite began as a project of the close translation of religious texts into a visual language. It was a slow, arduous and ultimately stifling process, that "proved its own failure”1 to the artist. The set of propositions with which she started were predisposed to an eventual fragmentation. Principally among her concerns was the relationship between the text and the image – the imagery within a given text, as well as the reading of an image as a text – and the possibility of translation of one into the other. However, the thrust of her project rested in her preoccupation with ‘hope’, which is to say, in the allegories of redemption that are fallen back on in our era declared to be "post-truth”, or supposedly after the end of history. For this, Kalache turned to textual representations of paradise and the heavens.

The earliest trials in her process were long, scroll-like and hand-drawn works on paper. Intensely detailed and sumptuous, they were anachronistic in their magnificence. They were also the least abstract of her oeuvre. Working from a single text which she found herself effectively transcribing, her figures, skies honeycomb milk fleshy ripe fruits beaks wings claws collapsing walls vegetation partial bodily objects from various spaces and times – or rather, no-place and no-time – come to affirm and efface each other. Earlier in her process, Kalache wrote, this time in words, that it was "a playful dive into the psyche, an attempt at symbolic cohabitations in a space where all floats, collides and coexists.” 2 With a growing sense of unease, she drifted from an accurate translation, abandoned the utopian narrative, and found that the structure of the work was breaking down. The imminent rupture in the language – in the loosening of gestures – was already inscribed in the content of her earliest drawings as the collapse of the heavens, and yet could only formally break in the process, with the exasperation, apprehension, and depletion that stemmed from language’s inherent elusiveness. Having been stunted for months by the carving of an unattainable fantastical world – which was so evidently invested with corporeality in its images, and yet believed to be transcendent and entirely divested of the body – Kalache let her hand go.

She read Agua Viva, the least accessible of all of Clarice Lispector’s works. Its fragmentary nature, lack of narrative and recognizable order was already resonant in her process. She was obsessively drawing on small sheets of paper in nude pinks and intensely bloodied reds, breasts and phalluses and flowers and thorns, all of which had already been in the earlier work but were now exploding. She was also reading the work of Hélène Cixous who herself wrote extensively on Lispector’s writing. In her book, Reading with Lispector(1990), Cixous identifies themes in Agua Viva that were reverberating in Kalache’s process. These were the problem of the word as that which dictates the law, wherein the latter does not exist without the former, and the problem of the law, or of that which is on the other side of the forbidden – pleasure. In her own process of écriture, Kalache was first constrained by the determinacy of her interpretation, but let herself go with the realization that she could write the law through a language imbued with her own pleasure. Then came the monumental paintings, all titled from Agua Viva fragments.

Kalache’s work – the small and large drawings, the earliest and the most recent paintings, the connective body of sculptures, and the paper installation – all proceed from the premise of a texte scriptible as opposed to lisible, in which the narrative and the laws of its genre are dropped. It gives way, not to an expected pleasure or awe, but tojouissance that can only arise when the stability and unity of the text is undercut. Following Lispector, Kalache flaunts a semantic play in her work, in the slippages between signifiers and signifieds that foreclose a singular meaning. Closure is endlessly deferred.

 

Natasha Gasparian – 2018

 

1 Described as such by the artist in our correspondences.

2 Ibid

---

---

 

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite

Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut - Lebanon

Solo Exhibit 2018

 

 

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite is an exhibition in which the artist turned to religious scriptures in search of answers concerning existence and concepts of hope. She proclaimed a stance that allowed her to translate away from notions of "origin" and the "sacred". The main series of paintings carries explosive and heavily symbolic elements which infiltrate the canvas with bright and unapologetic colours that emerge gradually as the text disappears. Kalache does not translate on the paper or canvas directly, rather, her artistic process is one of movement between different media from text, to paper, and on to canvases. Translation in this context is used to specify the act of transforming a text into an image as well as the movement from one medium to another. Through this intermedial journey, one could argue that a state of exile ensues when words have to be discarded for lines that form drawings. What is often considered to be lost in translation is found in the artist’s subjective presence on each of the works.

As the canvases begin to diverge from a point of origin, the scattering of the elements starts a different conversation that renders heavenly gardens, walls, and a female subjectivity that intensifies with each canvas as the colours become more vivid and the lines more defiant. The quest to translate textual descriptions of life after death falters as the works question other aspects of the body and the anxiety of human experience. Nature is abstracted, as one can easily spot flowers that are highly distorted, while, interruptions of peaceful gardens that depict the heavens are besieged by a galvanizing force proclaiming an exanimation of more minute and intimate details.

The works reveal what is underneath the skin or the layer protecting one’s interior from the exterior world. Through the dialogue between different elements one faces hidden thoughts, imaginations, fantasies, desires, and the raw human carnal capacity to long for what’s underneath the surface. For instance, the raw state of the banana sculptures is put into question as they linger in a state of the inedible and unbaked. They are raw and ready to be transformed. However, in choosing to leave the sculpted bananas exposed, the metaphor of both translation (from one media to another) and the raw state of existence are placed in opposition as the two main themes of the series: the uncooked and the untranslatable. The work has no need to remain faithful to the text and the long-running association of women’s role as the baker or cook creating edible substances is put into question.

The original becomes an abstract and objective realm whereby the translation depicts the sensible, the proximate, what is hidden, what is imagined, and what is revealed underneath the layers. What the iterations contain is a memory of a place, details of an ambiguous body as well as a relationship to words, intentions, hope, and a possible future rather than the past. The transposed elements do not reference a journey back to a place, rather the movement is acknowledged as one that is necessary for transparency. Indeed, the transformations demonstrate an impossible return whereby the infinite renders a mode of perpetual translation and an ambivalent relationship between the past and the present.

Rania Jaber - 2018

 

---

Text by Marie Muracciole
Translated to english by Ziad M.Nawfal
Beirut Art Center

Exposure 2014

Under Construction

 

In the next room, two large compositions on paper by Hiba Kalache face one another on either side of a wall, where various smaller drawings are freely associated; they exist independent of one another, but acquire additional meaning through the order assigned to them by the artist. Each smaller print contaminates its surrounding, or intersects with the echoes and relationships created around it. This arrangement provides an adequate description of Hiba Kalache’s working method, as it displays the processes of development and synthesis underlying the entirety of her work; the latter emerges in the preparation of larger prints: a world of material shifts, layers, connections and occlusions constitutes these surfaces. They exist by way of sedimentation, in successive elaborations that eventually cancel each other out; but no stratum disappears entirely, on the contrary it provides depth and texture to that which covers it. The arrangement brings to mind the process of dream-distortion summarized by Freud in the famous formula ‘displacement and condensation’. Everything we see is something else as well, and appears to us on multiple levels.

Several elements feed into Hiba Kalache’s work. She draws and collects maps of Beirut and plans of neighborhoods previously barricaded during the civil war. She recounts these obstructions, or restores routes marked by collective history, as well as events from her own life. These sources, such as the images of explosions she keeps in her studio while working on her series, describe a form of general visual memory where Kalache physically builds her imagination. The combination of unequal, almost incompatible spaces and times resembles a process of induced weightlessness. From these disturbances of spatial cohesion and the elemental sense of terrestrial gravity, is born a subtle balance between destruction and regeneration. This is probably the work process that evokes Beirut the best, a diachronic approach that seems in constant negotiation with its own memory.

Hiba Kalache lives in Beirut, having pursued her studies in the United States and taught visual arts.

 

---

In 2004, in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag considers a question posed by Virginia Wolfe’s 1938 reflection on the roots of war, Three Guineas: "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” Separated by more than sixty years of history and technological advancement, both women considered whether photographs documenting the atrocities of war could be an effective vehicle to prevent future violence.

In 2020, an explosion of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in the capital city of Lebanon marked one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history. In the chaos that descended upon Beirut in the aftermath of the explosion, Hiba Kalache made the decision to leave her family home for the fourth time. Returning to San Francisco, where she earned her Masters of Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2005, she set up a studio and returned to work, insistent upon processing this latest chapter of violence through her paintings.

Trying to make sense of the cycles of war that led to her displacement, she churned through diverse sources: the writing of Susan Sontag, the poetry of Etel Adnan and the history of art, delving into a study of Islamic miniatures. Reveling in the color and detail of the forms, the familiar patterns of the calligraphy resonated with the gestures that kept appearing in her own work. The vivid blues and yellows that represent prophesy and divinity in the miniature tradition inflected the new paintings that seemed to erupt out of her with an urgency and forcefulness: a will to survive.

The exhibition title, ‘belliphonic,’ comes from Martin Daughtry’s term referring to the vast array of sounds that are created by conflict; not only weaponry, but motorized vehicles, sirens, generators, even the propaganda that fills the air in the wake of an insurrection. Kalache’s body carries these sounds just as she has carried new life in her womb.

Something of the belliphonic is translated through the act of painting, the memory of a sound inflecting her hand. But there is also a refusal to submit, to collapse in the wake of tragedy.

The paintings are abstract, but they attempt to depict something of the moment we find ourselves in today. They are both an act of protest and an attempt at escape. They look for beauty and rebirth in the explosion of blossoms spilling over a casket. They collapse time, pulling from historical references, grasping for answers to unanswerable questions, and challenging us to move forward with empathy and find connection through our shared humanity.

Kalache’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon and The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, Beirut, Lebanon. Group exhibitions include Beiteddine Palace, Beit ed-Dine, Lebanon; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France; Villa Romana, Florence, Italy; Beit Beirut Museum and Urban Cultural Center, Beirut, Lebanon; Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; The Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium; California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA.

For more information please contact Altman Siegel at [email protected] or 415-576-9300.