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Ghassan Salhab et El Hadj Demba Dia, © RAW Material Company |
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As part of Vox-ARTIS*, Raw Material Company invites you to a talk with the artist Ghassan Salhab, on Friday 3 March 2023 at 6pm @RAW Material Company located in Zone B, rue sans soleil Villa 2A.
Through his residency, Ghassan returns to his roots by following in the footsteps of his father. Of Lebanese origin, the latter was born and raised in Dakar where he founded his family and established his business before leaving for other lands. Behind this story lies the history of the Lebanese-Syrian communities in Senegal, the different forms of migration they have experienced, but above all the links forged, or not, within the communities they still live in today. Leading a real quest, Ghassan will share with us the fruit of his peregrinations in the city of Dakar as well as its periphery, but also with artists and cultural actors belonging or having been in contact with this community.
*vox-ARTIS is a free space for presentation, discussion and confrontation of ideas about art, its practice, production, collection, criticism, analysis and presentation. A moment of sharing around films on art, lectures by artists and other art professionals, portfolio reviews, book presentations and general debate on the role of artistic creativity in society. This program is made in collaboration with Massamba Mbaye. |
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© Ghassan Salhab |
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Our skin
We shouldn't have ever left Dakar, my father told us more than once, long before the current Lebanese disaster, long before he passed away, more than two years ago. This sentence ended up triggering a film-essay project, a kind of quest on this man from the Lebanese community who lived his first thirty-nine years in Dakar, about what traces, even imperceptible ones, can remain. |
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Born in Dakar, Ghassan Salhab now lives and works in Beirut. Apart from his own productions, he collaborates in writing screenplays and teaches at various universities in Lebanon. He has directed eight feature films: Phantom Beirut (1998); Terra Incognita (2002); The Last Man (2006); 1958 (2009); The Mountain (2011), The Valley (2014), An Open Rose / Warda (2019) and The River (2021) - as well as several "essays", including The Motionless Journey (2018) co-directed with Mohamed Soueid, Chinese Ink (2016), His Image (diptych-video, 2016), Everybody know this is nowhere (diptych-video, 2012), Le massacre des innocents (triptych-video, 2010), (Posthume) (2007), Narcisse perdu (2004), Mon corps mort, mon corps vivant (2003), La rose de personne (2000)... all selected in various international festivals and exhibitions. In 2016, he was "guest-in-residence" at the DAAD (Berlin) and in 2020 at the Camargo Foundation. The International Festival of La Rochelle, the JCC of Tunis, the Cinémathèque du Québec and the Festival International de Cine Guanajuato, have devoted a retrospective to him. He is also the author of two books: "Fragments du Livre du naufrage" (2012, Amers Editions) and "à contre-jour (depuis Beyrouth)" (2021, de l'incidence éditeur), as well as various texts published in specialised magazines. |
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Massamba Mbaye is an art critic, curator and consultant. He is a historian of communication theories and has specialised in cybernetics. This graduate in strategic marketing and communication teaches these specialties. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Mbaye is the current Managing Director of the DMedia Group. He was a member of the editorial committee of Afrik'Arts, an international magazine on visual arts published by the Dakar Biennale and has been coordinating the communication of Dak'art since 2016. He is also a member of the Dak'art Orientation Committee and is the author of several books on the visual arts in Senegal. |
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