Agial Art Gallery invites you to the opening of Rim El Jundi's exhibition on Thursday, July 15. 

To minimize crowding, we encourage visitors to drop in at any time between 3:00-7:00pm. Please note that masks are required for entry.

I’ve always painted as if I were jotting down my memoirs. When I was younger, these journals/paintings were quick, violent, loud, and spontaneous. As I grew older, my paintings began to calm gradually. I began to hide my cacophony in the motifs that I would repeat and repeat, as if I were looking for some comfort in the repetition of things and in their ensuing order.

Now I have started sewing beads into my paintings.

At first, I didn’t understand why I was doing this. I certainly didn’t want to “decorate” my painting with beads, nor make intruders out of them. Rather, I wanted them to become a surface, a color, a texture, and a necessity in the composition of the work and in its completeness. I knew I wanted their form, but I also wanted a meaning out of their presence. 

It was then that I realized that the repetition of the motifs was no longer enough for me, that I was no longer just painting my memoirs, I realized that I had started “Painting Time” while enacting it on the canvas. I had developed the need to insert the mechanical movement of my body onto the painting, as I would sew one bead after another, slowly, methodically, for hours on end, as if one was either taming or punishing oneself.

What I do now is an exercise in patience that makes me one of the survivors, as well as one of the defeated. Here I am, surviving with the fragility of me nudity and its weakness. A nudity, without seduction, that I put in my painting with the weight of the beads.

What I do now is an exercise in enduring the passage of time that is dedicated to the act of waiting. It is an exercise performed by the lineage of embroidering, knitting, bead sewing grandmothers that came before me.

I wait for time to end what I cannot force to end.

And while waiting for the war to end, while waiting for the son to grow and for life to resume, I will continue sewing beads. -Rim El Jundi

*Face Masks are required for entry.