Global InformationNada Sehnaoui information
Nada Sehnaoui | |
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| Born | 1950 Beirut, Lebanon |
| Nationality | Lebanese |
| Occupation(s) | Visual artist, political activist |
| Years active | 1993-–present |
| Notable work | Peindre L'Orient-Le Jour (1999), Haven't 15 Years of Hiding in the Toilets Been Enough (2008), How Many How Many More (2016–present). |
Nada Sehnaoui (born 1958) is a visual artist and political activist. Her artworks, spanning painting, mixed media works, sculpture and installations, have been widely exhibited internationally, and have been featured in the press and print publications worldwide.
Sehnaoui, who was born in Beirut and received her academic training in history, sociology, film, and the fine arts, is a pioneer of large-scale ephemeral public art installations in Lebanon and the Middle East. Active since the early nineteen-nineties, she has been a part of shaping the postwar Lebanese artistic scene through artworks that seek to provoke a discussion around issues surrounding the memory of wars, in particular the 1975-1990 Lebanese Civil War. She has denounced the personal and collective amnesia surrounding this conflict, as well as Lebanon's physical and political fragmentation that followed it. Her works not only underscore the imperative of reflecting on the multiple memories of that war but also on the processes and necessity of national reconciliation. She questions the writing of History and the construction of identity, in the Arab world and beyond, and continuously asks for reflection and rebellion against the status quo.
Sehnaoui's paintings, sculptures, and installations are characteristically time- and labor-intensive, drawing a parallel between her artistic process and the time necessary to process memory.[1] She is known for her recurrent use of repetition as a stylistic and meaning-breeding effect, intersecting the work's experiential time, creative time, and archival time, especially in her large-scale installations, staged in urban spaces and in institutions, and which make use of everyday life objects. She is also preoccupied with the aesthetics and emotional charge of conceptual art.
Her body of work includes installations such as Fractions of Memory (2003), Waynoun? Where are They? (2006), Haven’t 15 Years of Hiding in the Toilets Been Enough? (2008), and Light at the End of the Tunnel (2012), and series of paintings incorporating layers of paint, objects, words and images, as seen for instance in Peindre L'Orient-Le Jour (2000), How Many How Many More (2014–present), orTulips for a Wounded Country (1992–present).
Sehnaoui's works have been exhibited internationally in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East and North Africa, including in New York, Boston, Washington D.C., London, Paris, Marseille, Liège, Houston, Munich, Beirut, Dubai, and Doha.[2]
An activist in the fields of human rights and political reform, Sehnaoui is a member of Beirut Madinati, an urban public policy organization under whose umbrella she ran for a seat on Beirut's municipal council in 2016.[3] She is also a founding member of the Civil Center for National Initiative, whose works include a legal campaign to remove reference to sect from state records, and an initiative to legally administer civil marriages in Lebanon.
- ^ Tomb, Marie (2019-03-29). "How Many How Many More by Nada Sehnaoui" (PDF). Le WAW. Exhibition pamphlet at Galerie Tanit, Beirut. Retrieved 2019-10-11.
- ^ "Sehnaoui Nada". MACAM. Retrieved 2019-10-09.
- ^ El-Khoury, Bachir (2017-06-19). "Lebanon's civil society groups gear up for 2018 elections". Al-Monitor. Retrieved 2019-10-09.