Beirut - Saba:
"Rabiz" Gallery in Beirut recently hosted on Friday an exhibition by artist Christine Kettaneh, which included a series of art works ranging from sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage, using contemporary art methods that do not belong to a specific artistic style.
According to al-Mayadeen website, the Lebanese financial crisis has weighed heavily on the artist Kettaneh, like all Lebanese, and she expressed in her own way her visions of the reactions of the crisis and its repercussions in public life, behavior, and souls.
Kettaneh compares the material of life, politics, and the economy with what the currency that collapsed under the weight of the crisis symbolizes, and she believes that the currency is no longer able to serve the purpose for which it was created, i.e. bread - a source of livelihood, money as a value, and the home as a safe shelter.
The exhibition consists of several sections, the first of which is more like a question “Who Killed Beirut?” It is a series of photographs documenting the artist’s work that won first prize at the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice in 2015, and versions of which were shown in Beirut, Tehran and Venice.
The second section of the exhibition was “House, Bata and Yabeit”, which symbolizes how war and displacement uproot the homeland by stripping it of its meaning as shelter and belonging.
In the third section, the artist is obsessed with the loss of confidence in the banking system that occurred starting with the street movement in 2019, and the repercussions of that collapse.
Christine Kettaneh is a Lebanese artist based in Beirut. She holds an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (2013) and an MA in Finance and Economics from the London School of Economics (2005). In this way, she combined an understanding of economics and translated it into an artistic understanding.
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