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.

Natasha Gasparian
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