Sara Ghahramani, Daniil Galkin, Valentina Medda

Sara Ghahramani's paintings presented at Open Studios are the documentation of a personal investigation of Beirut; a city layered with stories.

Drawing from literature, found images, vintage Lebanese movie posters, she explores ways in which social and personal memory finds its way and is translated into visual language.

Building up and scraping off the paint is intended to create a composition of fragments where shapes and colors work as independent forms and as part of a larger whole.

Following Daniil Galkin's ongoing research he presented a reconstruction of the "egg”, one of Beirut's iconic architectural structures left disfigured after the civil war.

Upon discovering the origins of the "the egg" and associating it aesthetically and figuratively with an amputated limb, the artist reconstructed the monument in a sculptural form.

The accompanying 'limbs' toppling over one another demonstrated the fleeting collective memory of those affected by war.

Valentina Medda's project titled 'S’ùltimo Attitu' (Sardinian for 'The Last Lamentation') was a video piece based on the ancient tradition of the professional mourning.

'The Last Lamentation' is a performance re-enacting a collective mourning that addresses sorrow for bodies lost while migrating through The Mediterranean Sea.

Presented as a preliminary study, the project is meant to travel around the Mediterranean, where it will be performed live in different cities along the coasts.