Collection: Manar Ali Hassan

Manar Ali Hassan is an emerging artist from Beirut, Lebanon. She obtained her Masters Degree in Visual Arts in 2019. Her ongoing work revolves around reshaping identities in the shadow of an inescapable painful body. Her work has been exhibited at many galleries in Lebanon and at STOA collective, Dublin in 2020.

Not to be confused with the fantasy world of Alice in Wonderland, in his book Over-Sensitivity (1996), Jalal Toufic invites us to explore spaces that are radically disconnected from their surroundings but, as a result, directly connected to a radical elsewhere: Radical Closures. Thus, Toufic triggers in us the curiosity to, among other things, detect ostensibly nonexistent borders, and to experience the sudden irruption of unworldly, ahistorical fully-formed entities.

Inspired by the surrealistic paintings of Magritte, Miro, and the collage work of Ernst and Schwitters, I turned to my computer and attempted to digitally represent my current understanding of Toufic’s Radical Closure. Hoping that entities may irrupt out of my control out of nowhere or a radical elsewhere, I found myself preparing to gamble everything by setting the structure of radical closure that would make it possible for such entities to irrupt in my file and on the screen.
In the end, my aim wasn’t to reach a final solution to the picture puzzles; my aim was to keep it as an intractable mystery.