Annie Kurkdjian’s Flight and Enclosure at albareh gallery is one of the most provocative exhibits I have seen in Bahrain. Occasionally artists paint abaya-clad women or soft, ephemeral women whose faces remain obscured. Kurkdjian’s work is provocative, not only because she is an Arab painting naked women, but because she reveals how they feel.
Upon entering, a woman bored out of her mind drew me across the entire gallery to the sunroom. The woman/girl’s life is so tedious, the only thing she has to do is twiddle a tiny black box – or blank space – in her delicate fingers. Her eyes are not filled with fear or anger, nor hope, nor joy – just boredom. Actually her boredom is so great, she looks feeble-minded as if trapped in a state of perpetual adolescence.
All the naked women shared the same ennui.
After absorbing that initial impact, I toured the gallery to see if I could witness the artist’s evolution.
Her 2007 and 2008 paintings were done in dark colors and incorporated pain and archetypal symbols: witchy women, cages, ravens, mummified beings and blood. Their darkness reflects the underworld; the psyche’s dark realms; and the artist’s experience as a young girl during Lebanon’s civil war.
Kurkdjian began to rise from the depths and into the world but with a changed perspective. Since at least 2009, she incorporated a surrealist style and elongated her subjects’ limbs into curves only a Bahraini highway engineer could imagine. She painted both women and men whose giraffe necks give them a 180 degree view of the world.
2013 Kurkdjian burst into the light of the living. Her colors became brighter. Her subjects were more vibrant as if new energy had entered the women’s lives.
Yet, despite escaping the darkness, in this new life, her young women cannot get out of bed.
Lying across her bed like a wet noodle, the young woman has nothing to look forward to and cannot generate the will to participate in another dull day.
Another cannot leave her bed because her boredom has become her pain, forcing her round, healthy body into a fetal position.
One woman is in so much actual pain, her fingernails dig furrows in her bedcovers. Her wasted body can barely hold her “black box” which is horribly out of place. She waits, presumably, for death.
When a few women do get out of bed, their day is spent in intimate investigation of their bodies. Three young women, echoing their Greek sisters, the muses, discover their beautiful, long braids are really chains.
For the exhibit’s catalog cover, the woman is actually dressed, but not for going out in public. The highlight of her day is gobbling her food out of a giant, dog bowl which she does without real joy.
Perhaps the young women see a future destined to be like this mother with her dyed hair and face like a Frankenstein monster. Her body no longer her own, she has become a creation sewn together by some mad doctor. Resigned to the boredom of servitude, she lifts the tray and serves us her milk cups.
The exhibit’s official description was the usual art speak and made no sense to me. What I saw was an exhibit describing the poor state of women’s lives, particularly those who have survived war. Kurkdjian did not title her paintings. Perhaps she did not need to as the women’s stories were in their bodies and eyes, not in their words.
ABOUT ALBAREH
Annie Kurkdjian’s exhibit runs through December 30, 2013 at albareh gallery in Adliyah. I highly recommend it. Click picture below for a link to online catalog.
Tales of Dragons, Rabbits and Roosters 