Focus on Contemporary Design at 5th Edition of BEIRUT ART FAIR
Modern and Contemporary Art Fair dedicated to artists of the ME.NA.SA (Middle East, North Africa, South & South East Asia) region, BEIRUT ART FAIR will hold its 5th edition at the Beirut International Exhibition Leisure Center (BIEL) from September 18 to September 21, 2014, led by Laure d’Hauteville and Pascal Odille, a press release said.
This year, BEIRUT ART FAIR is presenting 46 galleries from 14 countries. Whether renowned artists or artists yet to be discovered, rising stars or established artists in the art market.
Since design has conquered a proper and significant place of its own within the contemporary art world, BEIRUT ART FAIR presents, for the second year, a platform dedicated to the young Lebanese designers, the BLC Design Platform. The objective of this platform is to support the future of the Lebanese creative power.
This initiative would not have been possible without BLC Bank’s support, who has been investing in the Lebanese artistic and cultural development for several years.
Maria Halios, Deema Kotob, Nayef Francis, Anastasia Nysten were the winners of the first edition held in 2013 which brought together around 12 designers.
This year, 3 winners will be selected from among the following designers: Khaled El Mays, Carlo Massoud, Cyrille Najjar, Joseph Kfoury, Sandra Macaron, Sibylle Tamer Abillama, Wyssem Nochi, Zena Baroudi, Ziad Abillama, Claudia Chahine and Henry Dakak.
Next September, they will present their prototypes alongside renowned galleries within the space dedicated to design in BEIRUT ART FAIR.
« The importance and the power of the Lebanese Design currently reside in the excellence of its artists. Funding this platform is a way for us to support small and medium businesses. Following the exhibition, the winners’ works will be carried out by a professional designer» states Maurice Sehnaoui, BLC Bank’s Chairman General Manager.
« Designers control the world’s volcanoes»
Philippe Trétiack, journalist, writer, senior reporter for Elle Magazine and responsible for the architecture column in the Beaux-Arts Magazine, was invited to visit the platform and share his favorite artworks.
He explains his approach in these terms: «As stated so well by the Lebanese architect Youssef Tohmé, nowadays, it is up to artists and, in particular, builders and designers, to act as sociologists.
In a country where communities mingle and clash, history is a burden. Whoever wishes to tell it runs the risk of creating conflict due to the fact that memories oppose and contradict each other.
Artists must, therefore, find a way which will allow both sides to recognize and contemplate each other.”
Focus on three designers, Philipe Trétiack’s favorites
Khaled El Mays
« A little bit Renni Mackintosh, a little bit fakir, his furniture plays with the organic and the colors, suffused with a subtle masochism. A cutting-edge design? »
Khaled El Mays’ work revolves around a research on multiplicity and repetition. It is a process based on objects’ mutations.
In 2013, he launched his first collection, entitled RHIZOMES. This term, used in botany, refers to certain plants’ underground stems which give rise to new roots or aerial stems. El Mays evokes the rhythm present in nature and texture transformation.
Carlo Massoud
«The touchable soft beauty and a hint of a social criticism to women’s condition in the Middle East and beyond. Bullet-shaped dolls or bullet-shaped breasts or even pointed warheads? A mystery we would like to contemplate».
The Lebanese Carlo Massoud became an interior designer and creator of objects. He studied at ALBA (Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts) and then earned his master’s degree in the design of objects for the luxury goods industry at ECAL in Lausanne.
There, he got the chance to work with leading names in the international design industry such as Ronan Bouroullec, Barber Osgerby, Marti Guixé, Pierre Charpin, Umberto and Fernando Campana, who, through their advices participated in Massoud’s learning process.
“MAYA, ZEINA, RACHA, and YARA” are 4 black wooden dolls. The designer reinterprets the traditional Middle Eastern women’s clothing, giving a new function to the object: each doll is empty from the inside so that one can hide its treasures in it.
Sandra Macaron
«Between guilt’s levity and weight, the cage as a prison and a promise. A design between Zen and discomfort, delicate, volatile and poetic»
Sandra Macaron won several awards as a multidisciplinary designer and many of her works have been exhibited at important events dedicated to design.
She won the first prize of the 2008 Robert Bruce Thompson Competition in the United States. Sandra Macaron studied in Beirut and attended the prestigious Parsons School in New York.
She has also enrolled in courses at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. There she explored the field of industrial design which led to her increased interest in the world of furniture.
Back in Beirut in 2010, she continued on such path and opened her business which enabled her to develop her own creative process.
She continued her career as an interior designer participating in residential and restaurant projects while teaching at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in the Department of Interior Design and Lighting Design.
THE BIRD CAGE SERIES, the concept which gave birth to this collection, was the image of a freedom-loving bird, locked in a cage, symbolizing the ideologies and misconceptions that imprison us.
This work is a metaphorical representation of the individual facing his own confinement system, his internal boundaries, and the barriers that limit his liberty and fantasy.
The BEIRUT ART FAIR places Beirut in September 2014 as the cultural and intellectual capital of the Arab world and as the contemporary art hub between East and West.
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