Said Baalbaki: Gestern wie heute

archive-single-exhibition-detail.php

The first institutional solo exhibition of the Lebanese-German artist Said Baalbaki shows a cross-section of his artistic work since he moved to Berlin-Moabit twenty years ago. Baalbaki combines painting and conceptual art with a focus on the exploration of mechanisms of establishing truths and the construction of history. With the title Gestern wie heute (As in the past so in the present), he refers to the parallelism and repetition of events in individual and social history.

Baalbaki presents painting, sculpture and spatial installations: Arabic words formed from bronze belts and monolithic architectural fragments of various cult sites, built from coal briquettes, can be seen in the Galerie Nord. In the two rooms Al Burak and Jussuf Abbo, the artist deals with the museum as an institution and with the issue of its power in creating history. He deconstructs and constructs historiography and myth-making by means of real and fictitious archaeological finds, objects and documents in complex image spaces that oscillate between historical research and fiction. In Al Burak, he simulates a museum room about the excavation site of Muhammad’s legendary horse. With Jussuf Abbo, he reconstructs the tragic biography of the Palestinian-Jewish sculptor who lived in Berlin from 1911 to 1935.

Baalbaki, who experienced the Lebanese civil war, reflects on the dependence of the individual – the artist – on socio-political events, as in his own biography and that of Jussuf Abbo.

He is a traveller between the worlds, a mediator between Berlin and Beirut, and he creates a multi-layered fabric of historical research, transcultural poetry and artistic fiction.

Press:
Barbara Polla: “Gestern wie heute” in Art-Critique, 22.2.23
Rolf Brockschmidt: “Der Künstler Said Baalbaki” in Tagesspiegel, 5.3.23
Matthias Reichelt: “Bis auf die Knochen” in nd, 21.3.23
Katrin Bettina Müller: “Wanderer zwischen den Welten” in taz, 5.3.23

Kindly supported by the district funding of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Bezirkskulturfonds.