RHEIM ALKADHI is a visual artist based in Berlin who works internationally. Alkadhi operates under contemporary conditions in alternating geographical contexts, circumscribed by objects, images, and texts, via digital media, interactions in public space, and intimate person-to-person contact.

Rheim AlKadhi has spent the last 2 months in residence in Beirut, a city she was already familiar with from time spent years ago, but a city that is no longer the same. Alkadhi has been moving through neighborhoods and out, to peripheries and margins, temporary abodes and shelters, places of waiting and departure. She shifts scales, from geopolitical –as she travels along borders of global migration and trafficking– to much smaller, inside homes, work and marketplaces engaging people in intimate conversation and exchange. She a-mends and enables degraded objects, folding and unfolding them, holding and suspending their meanings, if indeed meaning can be made of this world.

For Devastation on Your Beautiful Eyes, Rheim Alkadhi’s solo-exhibition at Beirut Art Center –her first in Lebanon, the artist recounts her observations through meticulous arrangements and framings of detritus scavenged along her path. During a visit to the scrap yard in Sabra, she came across a discarded print containing 4 pages of densely overlaid Arabic type. Barely legible, she deciphered them to be printing proofs of Karl Marx’s Kapital. Each misaligned page is made to anchor a quadrant in the exhibition space. On the floor and walls, tarps, like those hung from balconies to protect from dust and elements, become not sails, but the fugitive sea or open field. In an enigmatic photograph found among the wares of our Sunday market neighbors, a woman –a lover? a domestic worker?– lays on a rug with contemplating eyes. Elevated tension cables traverse the space, with warped multicolored metal scraps dangling like laundry in the wind. Also overhead, a blackened oversized filament rotates like a ceiling fan fomenting uprising winds.

Visuals prepared by Nour El Samman in the framework of BAC Graphic-Designer in Residence Program