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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Following a first edition of BLIND DATE in our Beirut space in 2017, we are bringing the concept to Hamburg, with a group exhibition including artists from outside our gallery roster. Unknown to us and to each other, the 6 invited artists for this second edition are coincidentally all young female artists. With widely different practices and modes of expressions, they all have ties to the Arab-speaking world, and address each in her own way questions and subject matters linked to their roots and cultural heritage.

Daniele Genadry (*1980 in Baltimore, USA, lives and works in Paris, France and Beirut, Lebanon) works with painting, photography and print, to examine conditions and contemporary forms of seeing, particularly those present in postwar Lebanon. Her practice considers the potential of an image to generate its own temporality (light), and to create a mediated field of vision that sensitizes our consciousness.

Tala Worrell (*1991 in New York, USA, lives and works in Los Angeles, USA) is a Lebanese-American painter who grew up in Abu Dhabi. Through her abstract, gestural, paintings she negotiates the relationships between various parts of herself: “East and West, religious and secular, familial and individual, and psychological and somatic”.

Amna Elhassan (*1988 in Khartoum, Sudan, lives and works in Saudi Arabia) portrays in her paintings the socio-political changes and cultural resistance in Sudan. Challenges and emancipation struggles faced by women in her community are at the core of her work.

Bayan Kiwan (*1995 in Amman, Jordan, lives and works in New York, USA) is a Palestinian-Jordanian artist whose research and practice are driven by questions of place, memory, and the everyday as an inscrutable site of resistance. An extension of this, her paintings are explorations of women’s private sociality and intimacy.

Alia Farid (*1985 in Kuwait City, Kuwait, lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico) is a filmmaker and sculptor whose practice centres on lesser-known histories that are often deliberately erased. She looks at the ecological devastation of southern Iraq and the forced displacement of its people, the under-told histories of Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the intersectional Palestinian–Puerto Rican solidarity movement.

Farah Al Qasimi (*1991 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, lives and works in New York, USA) engages with postcolonial structures of power, gender, and the prevailing aesthetics of the Gulf States in her multimedia work. Her photographs, films, and performances effortlessly tell stories between documentation and fiction, metaphor and banality, with lightness and humor.