Jehad Nga “New Work: Mali and Libya”
Benrubi Gallery
This event has ended.
This new body of work by Nga once again strikes a powerful aesthetic balance between the personal and the political; the emotive and the pragmatic; the humane and the inhumane. In his stark minimalist images, Nga turns his decades long exploration of the people and cultures of Northern Africa into a quiet meditation on life and community in these uniquely challenging countries.
“To me, it is these brief flashes of affection and communion that lend a greater dimension to a vision of a country.” Nga explains, “In unsuspecting places while in Mali, I wanted to grasp a greater relief in trying to harness the various obscured layers, and compress these moments into a series of beats rather than a sequence of photos. Moving against the grain I have become so familiar with over the years, I felt more inclined towards looking for these symbols of remoteness, which punctuate the pervading sense of intensity Mali is charged with.“
Nga’s portraits are at once sympathetic and removed, unflinching, and often decidedly obscured. It is easy to lose one’s bearings when presented with these figures, and it is precisely this difficulty relating to hidden faces that becomes a theme for the period he was in these countries. The images suppress common narratives of war with the overpowering color and texture that Mali and Libya radiates.
Also on view in the gallery’s project room will be selections from Nga’s Green Book series. Completed last year, the series takes its name from The Green Book, a short book setting out the philosophies of former Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi. The project saw the artist “intercepting” censored images from the internet in Libya, converting them into binary code, and combining them with the code of each chapter of The Green Book. The result is an unsettling and oddly beautiful group of images created entirely from preexisting data. Each print, while visually magnetic for their striking primary palette and digital abstract forms, asks sobering questions about technology, government and our place in the digital age.
[Image: Jehad Nga “Untitled (Mali #3)” (2013) chromogenic print. size varies with edition]
Media
Schedule
from May 29, 2013 to July 13, 2013