ArtMargins, June 2019

Bio

Born in Beirut, Hiba Kalache is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 2005, Kalache received a Masters of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. In 2017, she taught fine arts at the Lebanese American University.In 2018, she had a solo show in Beirut with Saleh Barakat Gallery.

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Contemporary drawing, Arabic handwriting, accidental encounters, conversations/ terrains and borders, sectarian land divisions, geopolitical contexts, Syria, Lebanon

2019© ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00245