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Join us in celebrating the opening of Gallery 44 and A Space Gallery's late fall exhibitions!
In Gallery 44 and A Space Gallery's Main Galleries and Vitrines, Mani Mazinani presents ARK/I’VE. Continuing thematic explorations at the intersection of performance, sound and image-based practices, Gallery 44 and A Space Gallery will mount the first comprehensive survey of over two decades of photographs, videos, films, installations and improvisations by Mani Mazinani. The expansive exhibition marks the first collaboration between our neighbouring artist-run centres in nearly a decade, and will be augmented by multi-media public programs, including screenings and musical performances, and a limited edition publication.
In the Members' Gallery, Love Letter to the Father I Wish I Knew draws from Magida El-Kassis’s family photographic archives to reconstruct the childhood of her father, who left Lebanon at eighteen and rarely spoke about the life he left behind. When she asked about his early years, he offered only fragments, just enough to let her imagination complete the story.
Through collage, weaving, and natural dyeing, El-Kassis reworks family photographs to give these fragments a second life. Threads are hand-dyed with materials found across Lebanon, creating a material connection between where she lives and where her family comes from. Weaving becomes a way of reconstructing what is incomplete: bringing together fragments of memory, inheritance, grief and imagination. Something, she has come to understand, is not always complete until it has been broken down and rebuilt.
