Nameless Figures, Rebel Codes
Artwork2024
Keywords : Collective Exhibition, Artwork, Creative direction, Sculpture, Still life, Costume Design, Team leading.
Medium: Photography, multimedia elements
Size: 40x50cm each with frame.
Description : These four photographic artworks were made through an intimate collaboration between, Nour Choukeir, Elsn Lahoud, Rim Choucair, Moe Rida and Hala Saab.
They are an exploration of traditional costume elements, inquiring about their meaning, and how they can be modernized.
A rebel farmer from the Lebanese silk trade steps off her platforms, called ib'ab, to sit on a throne of her own making. She unshackles a rose from it's glass cage- and in her hands it turns to gold.
She wears a princesses headpiece. She is a farmer from the peasants revolution of 1858, and her freedom is hers to claim.
Once in the form of copper cast figurines from the Lebanese National Museum- the photographs give the soldiers a name, a body, and a voice. They still carry this burden however, in the form of a copper dress.
These photographs were constructed by examining the transformation from human to object and vice versa. This represents Lebanon's history of continuous occupation and exploitation. The object, the objectified, and the objectifier.
By echoing Lebanese history in the fashion context, we acknowledge that these garment and style are loaded with stories and messages.
These narratives and symbols are essential to communal and national growth, to evolve beyond the cycles of our past.
During the ottoman era, rebel groups would communicate by embedding symbols into gifts, objects, and very often the things that they wear.
The photographs of the Encrypted Rose and the Seven Spouted Jug are symbolist paintings that represent these secret languages —they are nods to our fellow citizens, that while we carry the weight of our past, it is also a wellspring that can inform us, and perhaps by being rebels in our own way, we can thrive.