Suspended Together gives the impression of movement and freedom. However, a closer look the dove allows the viewer to realize that its actually frozen and suspended with no hope of flight. An even closer look shows that the dove carries on its body a permission document that allows a Saudi woman to travel. Notwithstanding their circumstances, all Saudi women are required to have this document, issued by their appointed male guardian.

The artist reached out to a large group of leading women from Saudi Arabia to donate their permission documents for inclusion in this artwork. “Suspended Together” carries the documents of award-winning scientists, educators, journalists, engineers, artists and leaders with groundbreaking achievements that gave back to their society.

The installation “Suspended Together” depicts [...] doves [...] carrying permission documents on their white porcelain bodies; these allow Saudi women to travel under the country’s male guardianship system. Eight years since the piece was made, this law has been removed. “My art is historical now!” Manal AlDowayan says, proudly.

Extracted from an interview to Manal AlDowayan by Dalia Dawood in Financial Times. 5 December, 2019.

The tunnel is in itself a polyphony of meanings, a polysemy which symbolizes all the dark, anxious, painful crossings or expectations that can lead to another life. Meticulously executed, the watercolors are of a monumental scale. This medium requires letting go while striking a balance between control and freedom of the gesture. Watercolour is the medium of choice for text illustration, from Egyptian or medieval manuscripts. Immersive, these drawings catch the eye, as if you could pass to the other side of the mirror or get sucked in. They only become even more credible thanks to tenfold illusionist effects that encourage this transition to another world. Dagoberto Rodríguez creates ultra-contemporary and urban narratives of a mechanical, cold and dehumanized world bathed into an electric light … A kind of outside world, closed in itself, enigmatic, without landmarks and of which we do not know if it is dreamlike, dystopic or concrete.

Extracted from the text Trough the Tunnel. Jérôme Sans.

My work is metaphorical and symbolic, however the metaphors often have a profound conceptual value.

Dagoberto Rodríguez, 2019.

Joel Andrianomearisoa probes intimacy from a nodal experience: the crystallization of desire. The sensitive world –sensations, sensuality and the memory archives, reminiscences– are the main focus of this course. Space, as it oscillates between the spiritual –epistolary sublimation, images of evanescence– and the carnal –caressing of the tissues– is the space of a sensory memory, and an imaginary world that works it as an object of fantasy.

Formation of a square synthesises the colours, architecture and geometric patterns that are repeated all along the Silk Route. Avedissian observed that nomad traders divided their tents in geometric forms of fabric so the pattern adjusts to a final tent shape. Formation of a square is based on this geometrics and colours through squares containing other geometries of painted wood.

Avedissian’s art is based on – and draws inspiration from – the work of many people, of different places throughout the millennia that the artist discovered on his travels and which always conveyed to him the same elemental forms, colours and designs. Chant Avedissian’s work synthesises the colours, architecture and geometric patterns that are repeated all along the Silk Route and Egypt. This artwork makes up an iconographic archive of Egypt that nourishes his visual discourse about the permeability of cultures. His works can be understood and read as an affirmation of his an own Egyptian identity as well as the uniqueness coming from a collective and universal heritage, that goes beyond all borders: an Eastern identity standing up to Western supremacy.

My art master was the adobe brick.

Putting three bricks together to make a wall, to make a pattern, it’s magic.

Chant Avedissian.

Avedissian is intrigued by Arab desert life and admires the provisional dwellings of the Bedouins, who can easily pack up and take all their belongings with them. This freedom of movement, of easily moving one’s home and possessions, gave him the idea to make the corrugated cardboard stencils or scrolls, which are easy to produce, change, pack and transport; and can be rearranged in a different order, thus telling alternative stories.

Katerina Gregos. Chant Avedissian, 2017.

Jong Oh names ‘Line Sculpture’ to the works that are smaller than our body. In other words, a piece that our body can’t enter.

Although Line Sculptures have a dialogue with the space around it, the dialogue is stronger between the spaces within the sculpture.

The sculptures exists more independently from the space where they are located.

Cuboid series are works that are restricted in a cuboid structure. Dealing with restrictions has always been part of Oh’s art making, and that’s how acceptance became a big part of his philosophy. Restricting himself to work in a certain structure is challenging overtime but it also pushes him to investigate deeply into new forms and materials in a different way from working freely without limits.

In art, as in life, everything depends on the experience, the experience of reality. But what happens when the operation of forces and the relation of forms are materialized in the same experience? That, and the ability of art to question the limits of perception and slow down our relationship with our surroundings, is the subject of the work of Jong Oh.

Octavio Zaya. Towards the Void, 2018.

A very special piece. In strict concordance with Waqas Khan’s working process and timings: each artwork needs hours, days, weeks, some even months of concentration, breathing in and breathing out, to see the light. The piece ‘The Gibbous Moon’ follows the technics Waqas has developed but changes the surface, his long time loved Wasli paper, and uses a large canvas instead. Even further, the canvas is previously covered in black acrylic, so the artists’ white ink stroke changes radically. The ink on the paint reacts directly to the strokes creating a very different depth and quality, touching the artwork with a completely different dimension and spatial projection.

Khan’s meditative works are created by the contact between his hand and the wasli paper; Khan’s emotions drive his hand, and a simple change in his breathing or the tension with which he holds the pen will completely transform the stroke of his instrument.

Diana Campbell Betancourt. The Untitled Show, 2014.

The Traces series began in 2014, and was the first body of work Timothy Hyunsoo Lee created when he left the laboratory to be an artist in the studio. He called these works Traces because it's a double entendre that suggests his interest in investigating a part of his identity that is both ongoing and residual. The rendering of each "cell" underlies a formal investigation of his anxiety, both as a Korean and as an individual with chronic anxiety and nightmares. Timothy’s anxious self allows him to sit down for hours, even nights, meticulously painting thousands of dots without any foresight as to how the composition will turn out - his works are dictated by visceral reactions that he gets channeling his compulsions and tics into a visual language. Thus, he traces psychopathologies through a novel method of "mind mapping" in hopes of better understanding how he thinks and views the world.