BLANKETED bundles sit atop a battered Fiat – an assortment of belongings strapped to the roof of a car turning in a perpetual circle.
Ironing board, stool, TV set, boxes, a wicker basket – whose life is this crudely trussed up and transported in a hurry?
Destination X is an art work by Ayman Baalbaki, whose pieces centre on his native Lebanon and its repeated invasion by Israel.
The car represents his experience of constantly being forced to abandon his home, yet there is a lightness in the work that suggests optimism for the future.
Baalbaki is one of six contemporary artists from the Arab World exhibiting in The Bluecoat’s new show Arabicity: Such a Near East.
Its curator, Rose Issa, was keen to choose people who explore their cultural heritage from unique, unexpected and emotive perspectives.
“Since this exhibition coincides with the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival, I wanted to choose artists whose work represents different concerns in the Arab world,” she says.
“It’s great to be organising a show on this scale at the Bluecoat, as they were one of the first arts centres to promote the work of important Arab artists like Susan Hefuna and commission others like Khalil Rabah. They have an admirable ethos of giving a platform to diverse art communities.”
Baalbaki’s work was created during a residency at the Bluecoat.
“It expresses his experience of civil war, invasion and destruction into vibrant yet subtle oil paintings, suggesting that something meaningful, beautiful and touching can emerge from the worst circumstances,” says Issa.
Three walls of an entire gallery are filled with Chant Avedissian’s Icons of the Nile – paintings of performers, politicians, public figures and ordinary people who represented modern Egypt’s social and political heyday of the 1950s and early-60s.
“His work is full of warmth and wit,” says Issa.
“Famous and glamorous faces appear alongside pharaonic and Ottoman decorative symbols and everyday objects, from bus tickets to thermos flasks.
“The human figures represent the birth of a nation, while its objects convey its essence. He started producing such images during the first Gulf War in 1991, terrified that everything he held dear would disappear.”
The younger Arab generation is represented in the exhibition by Raeda Saadeh and collaborative duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, all from Palestine.
Abbas and Abou-Rahme have created a spund and video installation, which “transforms the relentless difficulties of daily life at home and the painful burden of history they have inherited into poetic works of art. The final artist is Fathi Hassan whose work is a celebration of his Nubian heritage.
ARABICITY: Such a Near East opens at The Bluecoat on Saturday and runs until September 5.
