Middle Eastern Galleries Now

Group Exhibition

On Line at Artsy

15 – 31 March 2021

East Wing is proud to present this exciting on-line showcase, “Middle Eastern Galleries Now” on Artsy, an online arts platform that features the world’s leading galleries, museum collections, foundations, artist estates, art fairs, and benefit auctions, all in one place. For this special showcase East Wing brings together a collection of represented international artists with unique viewpoints, tackling contemporary ideas through wide ranging visual narratives.

For this exclusive exhibition East Wing has mounted an exploration in documentary, portraiture and futurist visions by artists, Christto & Andrew, Tanya Habjouqa, Mahtab Hussain and Rania Matar.

Christto & Andrew ( Christian Sánchez Díaz, 1985 and Andrew Jay Weir, 1987 ) are an artistic duo based in Doha, Qatar and Copenhagen, Denmark. This collaborative duo work across various mediums including photography, installation and film, considering history, politics, the economy, popular culture and rigid societal normalities that they experience in everyday life, using colour and surreal still life portraits.

Tanya Habjouqa has earned a reputation for documentary that brings politics and creative vision into the same frame.  With a focus on gender, identity, and socio-political issues in the Middle East. Habjouqa takes on a series-based approach, immersed in research and interlaying journalistic, academic, conceptual and documentary practices. In recent years, her projects have received praise from World Press Photo, TIME, and the Smithsonian. She is has been commissioned by organizations such as Amnesty International to make multi-country media campaigns.  

Mahtab Hussain is a British artist who explores the important relationship between identity, heritage and displacement. His themes develop through long-term research articulating a visual language that challenges the prevailing concepts of multiculturalism. He has been recipient of numerous awards and commissions. Hussain was selected as the 2015 Light Work + Autograph ABP Artist-in-Residence, and chosen from 500 international artists to be ‘discovery artist’ under the prestigious Discoveries Award in 2016 at Houston FotoFest and has published four artist books.

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar’s cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative inform her photography. In her work she explores issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood. Matar photographs both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from, in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality all within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. She has also published 3 artist books.