YAY Gallery is delighted to announce its upcoming exhibition The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which will bring together the work of four artists from the Middle East and North America, including a specially commissioned work entitled Mapping Baku by Roberto Lopardo. Held in collaboration with Cuadro Gallery (Dubai), artists Camille Zakharia, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, Roberto Lopardo and Manal AlDowayan will use a range of media, including photography, print and sculpture to explore the relationship between memory, home and identity.
Roberto Lopardo's Mapping Baku, specially commissioned for the exhibition at YAY Gallery, represents the thirteenth installment from the series Mappings. The Mappings project engages the artist in a photographic performance in which one photograph is taken every minute during twenty-four contiguous hours. The final result is presented as a monolithic light-box, sequentially ordered in twenty-four rows (one row per hour), with each row containing sixty columns (one column per minute). The artist does not follow a predetermined path, instead engaging the landscape and subjects as they naturally present themselves. The resulting images provide the viewer with an insight into a location's visual chemistry - its colours, textures, habits, interactions and energies. Previous projects have taken place in the cities of Istanbul, Jeddah, Bahrain, Doha, Jerusalem.
Manal AlDowayan creates photographic works, producing a series of black-and-white prints that re-create the memories of a previous generation. Having come from an oil family and worked in the oil industry prior to becoming an artist, AlDowayan's photographic series If I Forget You, Don't Forget Me re-constructs the memories of her father's generation.
Through her photographs she documents the memories, conversations and objects from oilmen and women across Saudi Arabia to create her own stories and personal narratives. Camille Zakharia's Out Then series documents the journey taken since his departure from Lebanon in the civil war of 1985. His work, like AlDowayan's, reconstructs his encounters with people and places, exteriors and interiors. Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim will be showing both sculpture and collage from his Turãb series. Ibrahim creates abstract shapes and forms, which explore his relationship with nature, saying "with the feeling of being at one with nature, you begin to shed your layers, piece by piece, and commence with creating an artwork."