There is no unifying theme to the platform. However, each artist’s work reflects—and in many case addresses—the range of personal, political and socio-economic conditions in which we live today across the MENA region. In this sense, REVEALING by SGBL bears witness to some of the urgencies and issues governing society, and the interests shaping artistic practice.
Hadi Fallahpisheh’s monumental, long-exposure photographs engage with the contemporary nature of news and its circulation, while making use of fundamental photographic techniques, and the performance of the body in the darkroom. Ieva Saudargaite Douaihi’s work addresses age-old questions about photography’s relationship to its referent, using sculpture to make image and object meet tangibly. For Maya-Ines Touam, photography is a site to play with the construction of identities: in her work, symbols of contemporary Algeria meet tropes of Western vanitas painting.

Ghita Skali’s video work explores tensions between nature and technology in the service of surveillance in Morocco, while Nadim Choufi examines how sexuality and identity are mediated through technology, at the intersection of the human and the digital. Notions of national identity are pursued through the tactility of embroidery by Cristiana de Marchi, while Yusef Audeh and Balsam Abo Zour use painting to interrogate the mundane and the dark, the occupation and the allegory. Hussein Nassereddine’s graphic work explores the intimate histories of Arabic literature; while Lynn Kodeih considers the political potential latent in familiar landscapes.”