Saleh Barakat Gallery invites you to the opening of Tarek Elkassouf’s 1st solo exhibition “The Future is Near" on Thursday, 15 June 2023 5:00-8:00pm.

The Future is Near displays the quest for adaptation that is grief, as a journey through art. Exploring a human’s most intimate, primal, yet complex, reply to loss. The exhibition lives, and grieves, in Beirut. But the exhibition reflects life, the ongoing death, loss, trauma, instability and threats that happen daily across the world; at least one will affect everyone on the planet at some point.

The 50-piece body of work takes the observer through the five stages of grief; a grief which is expressed with a realist optimism. 

“Beirut has not been the same in the past few years. Wounded. Frozen. The old way disintegrated, but there was no path back to the same. 

Instead of people sharing dreams of a flourishing country, first, they needed to share the collective trauma. 

This exhibition is a call.  

This exhibition is a realistic call for optimism.  

A call for a journey inwards. Where the change starts. The art explores the collective through the individual; and illuminates the emotional pathway that leads from distress. 

Your invitation into grief is open.” -Tarek Alkassouf

Tarek Elkassouf is an artist based between Beirut and Sydney. 

Elkassouf’s art is about the dialogue between the sound of the machine and the silence of the man, practicing an ancient craft, when he finishes the piece. 

'What fascinates me the most is the exploration of loss and trauma.  

The concept of balance after loss. I feel there is an emptiness, a void there. We can understand the concept of emptiness, through what is not there; the empty, and its exchange with the full.   

It is the space between the words. Or the silence in the music which is as important as the notes themselves. The space between two worlds.' 

Elkassouf’s work has been commissioned by international museums such as the Institute of the Arab World in France, and Ithra in Saudi Arabia. And it has been added to the inalienable collections of the museums of France.