Charlotte Bank Projects
Salah Saouli: "Movimento", 2010

 

Close Encounters

 

Video, installation and performance

curated by

Charlotte Bank

 

On the occasion of the

 

1st Visual Arts' Festival, Damascus

organized by Association IN

(AIN)

opening: October 17, 2010

 

For Italo Calvino, cities were closely related to dreams, both phenomena being constructed through desires and fears. His "Invisible Cities" present a multitude of possible or impssible cities, some of them resembling dream-like mirages taken out of ancient legends and full of alluring temptations, others closer to the night-marish visions of Paul Auster's "Country of Last Things", a world where everybody is at war with everybody and mass-organized suicide seems an attractive way out of life's misery.

Somewhere in between these two extremes, the works gathered in this exhibition are located. While they are all positioned in the 21st century, they invstigate timeless aspects of urban reality, its ideas of the dark and hidden, its fantasies, its unknown lands to explore and conquer, the "asphalt jungles" where adventures yet undreamed of are waiting. 

Citiscaps reflect journeys through one's own mental landscapes. While navigating through urban spaces, landmarks - architectural or other - recall images that are located in the depths of our memory, thereby creating a mental map, paralleled by the urban setting.

 

Works by: Mohanad Yacoubi, Marwa Arsanios, Salah Saouli, Siska, Bassem Breche, Raed Yassin, Gheith Al-Amine, Christophe Katrib, Ghassan Halwani.

Charlotte Bank Projects | charlotte.bank.art@gmail.com