House of cards
Makhoul, Bashir (2014) House of cards. [Exhibition/show, Painting, Textiles]
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This exhibition at The Manchester Contemporary represents a new departure and adds to Makhoul's extensive oeuvre. In 1996, Makhoul bade farewell to painting. However this new collection sees a return to the medium, albeit with an entirely different formal and conceptual approach. The work is based on imagery from his contribution to the 55th Venice Biennale exhibition in 2013. "The Occupied Garden" was a large temporary cardboard city that filled one of the few larger private gardens of Venice. The paintings depict sections of the installation and are presented as formal, monumental 'views' of the cardboard city, affording it the same respect as Canaletto did the city of Venice. Also included in the exhibition are six large-scale tapestries of bullet holes.
For this exhibition Makhoul is showing work that deliberately evokes notions of art as monumental and commemorative as well as luxury commodities in a globalized market. The political is woven into the medium (literally, in the case of the tapestries), their modes of production and their representational content. Poverty and war are the warp and weft of 'life’s rich tapestry' in our advanced late capitalist world. It seems these days that wherever we look we either see an excess of wealth and luxury or scenes of atrocity and human misery. Makhoul is bringing them into the same space, while at the same time reminding us that art is more often than not, complicit in the distracting spectacles produced by power and wealth.
At the Imperial War Museum, North (IWM North), Makhoul also presented 'The Genie', a new site-specific installation on 26 September 2014, as part of the 3rd Asia Triennial Manchester (Conflict and Compassion).
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