Launching on Monday 15 March 2021, East Wing is proud to participate in the 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 presents a collection of represented international artists with unique viewpoints, tackling contemporary ideas through wide ranging visual narratives.
For this on-line 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.
You can see an editorial on the presentation Middle Eastern Galleries Now on Artsy hereChristto & Andrew ( Christian Sánchez Díaz, 1985 and Andrew Jay Weir, 1987 ) are an artistic duo based in Doha, Qatar and Copenhagen, Denmark. They commenced their collaboration in 2012 and have been working across various mediums including photography, installation and film. Their work looks at history, politics, the economy, popular culture and rigid societal normalities that they experience in everyday life, using colour and surreal still life portraits.
Christto & Andrew first gained international acclaim with their inclusion of the 2014 Foam Magazine "Talent Issue" and have since exhibited in solo exhibitions, group shows, biennials and art fairs worldwide, including the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2015), Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam (2016), NRW - Forum Düsseldorf (2017) and have been included in publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue Italia, Dazed magazine and the British Journal of Photography.
Tanya Habjouqa was born in Jordan and raised between Texas and the Middle East, 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, there is always a layer of gravitas and an intuitive sense of metaphor beneath her work. 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.
She is a mentor for the “Arab Photography Documentary Program” and teaches workshops internationally. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is in the permanent collections of the MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Carnegie Museum of art. Habjouqa is represented by East Wing Gallery in Doha, Qatar.
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 received his BA in History of Art at Goldsmith College specialising in Fine Art Photography; his MA in Museum and Gallery Management, City University, London; awarded an Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC), he completed a MA in Photography at Nottingham Trent University.
Hussain has been recipient of numerous awards and commissions including, Ikon Gallery, New Art Exchange, Arts Council England, Arts Humanities Research Council; he has also been winner of the Curators Choice Award, Culture Cloud at New Art Exchange and of Format 13 Portfolio Review Award for most significant review. 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.
Hussain has published four artist books. His You Get Me? series is published by MACK books with the support of Arts Council England winning the Light Work Photobook Award for 2017. Going Back to Where I Came From is being published by Ikon Gallery, supported by Arts Council England and The British Council. The Quiet Town of Tipton was published by Dewi Lewis and commissioned by Multistory and The Commonality of Stranger published by New Art Exchange supported by Arts Council England.
Hussain’s You Get Me? series debut in the UK at Autograph ABP, London in 2017, curated by Mark Sealy, it reached an audience in excess of 2m through print, online coverage, TV, and radio with prominent featured articles The Guardian, The Economist, The Independent, Vanity Fair, New York Time, Metro, Buzzfeed, Dazed and Confused among others.
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. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood. She works 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.
Rania Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. A mid-career retrospective was presented at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, in a solo exhibition: In Her Image.
Rania has received several grants and awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.
Her works are included in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide.
She has published three books L’Enfant-Femme (2016) “ A Girl and Her Room (2012) and Ordinary Lives (2009), She is presently working on her new monograph “SHE” with Radius Books which will be released in 2021. Rania is currently associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Exhibition runs until 31 March, 2021
To view this online exhibition, please visit East Wing on Artsy at:
https://www.artsy.net/east-wing
