Sitting in a parked car in Canada one day in 1998, Camille Zakharia realised that the painted lines that create parking spaces were an allegory for his own life.
“I began to think about the nature of lines that are drawn by others, that dictated the manner in which I was able to live,” says the Tripoli-born artist, who fled Lebanon’s civil war in 1985. “At that moment I realised that my life to this point had been an attempt to navigate these lines, lines that I did not create or condone.”
The result is a series of collages from the Bahrain-based photographic artist titled Division Lines, several of which are currently on display as part of his first solo exhibition in Dubai, at Cuadro Fine Art Gallery.
Zakharia has become one of the most celebrated artists in the Middle East.
His work won the Golden Lion Award as part of the inaugural participation of Bahrain in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010.
This year, he is the only artist from the Gulf to be represented at Italy’s Expo Milano 2015.
And even as the show runs in Cuadro, the photographs that were displayed in Venice are on display at the Barjeel Art Foundation show in Kuwait.
Zakharia, who binds just the right amount of conceptual art and personal narrative in his work, also lived in the United States, Greece and Turkey before moving to Bahrain in 1999.
It's only up close that you can make out the yellow or white paint on black asphalt in his Division Lines photos; from a distance, the images form geometric patterns.
The photos themselves have been cut and pasted back together in a kind of cracked eggshell pattern – jagged, disorganised, random.
Zakharia says he was inspired by an exhibition he once saw, where each day an artist placed a ceramic vase on top of ice plinths.
When the ice melted and the vase would finally break, she would glue it back together.
“I felt like she was talking about survival and that this was an echo of my life,” says Zakharia.
The eggshell cracks, therefore, offer hope, while clearly representing the artist’s journey.
“Yes,” he agrees. “They are cracks and alleys, detours that I have had to take to survive.”
Although his words hint at a pockmarked journey full of struggle, Zakharia seems very calm. He is soft-spoken and highly philosophical, and continues to marvel each time he sees his collection on the Cuadro’s walls.
“I always see something new in my work,” he says.
Also part of the show is a similar series called Markings as well as the series from which the exhibition takes its title, Out, Then.
Out, Then, 1992, which recalls a conversation Zakharia had during a family reunion, weaves photographs of pigeons or carrier birds, handwritten letters from his mother to the disparate members of his family and the Airmail envelopes that she sent them in. The same cracked texture appears on the surface.
“I am attempting to freeze a moment, to suspend it in time,” he says. “To be honest, I don’t know any more whether my work is about holding on to those moments in life or whether it is about letting them go. Or, in fact, whether it even matters.”
• Out, Then runs until March 3 at Cuadro Fine Art Gallery, Dubai International Financial Centre. For more information, visit www.cuadroart.com
aseaman@thenational.ae
