RAYYANE TABET: EXQUISITE CORPSE
Rayyane Tabet’s exploration into familial and archaeological history opens this month.
By Anna Seaman
In northeastern Syria, at the turn of the 20th century, a German diplomat named Baron Max von Oppenheim oversaw an archaeological excavation in a fertile valley close to the Turkish border. Von Oppenheim, who was charting a route for the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, unearthed stone idols and Neolithic statues. The artefacts were eventually removed and stored in a Berlin museum, where they were later shattered during the Allied bombing of the German capital. Now, their story has been brought to life in Exquisite Corpse, an exhibition at Sharjah Art Foundation by Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet. Tabet’s great-grandfather, Faek Borkhoche, was von Oppenheim’s secretary and translator on the Tell Halaf expedition, and his field notes, together with photographs that belong to the artist’s family and related objects, provide the formal and conceptual spine of the exhibition.
Curated by Ryan Inouye, the show delves into the history of the Tell Halaf excavation. It features two newly commissioned works: Portrait of Faek Borkhoche (2021), which draws on material from archives, including his great-grandfather’s never-seen-before field notes; and Digital Surrogates (2021), a web project which features documentation of Tabet’s artworks, Tell Halaf artefacts and related material, and explores the possibilities offered by digital preservation. An older work, Basalt Shards (2017), an expansive installation of 1,000 charcoal rubbings made from the shattered remains of the Tell Halaf artefacts, has been reconfigured for this major institutional show. “In this exhibition, the drawings are spaced farther apart than in previous iterations, inviting viewers to approach each drawing on its own terms, while also encouraging appreciation of the scale of the composition and ambition of the artist’s endeavour,” explains Inouye. That endeavour, in Tabet’s case, is for the artist to ask his audiences to consider the context of history and the mouthpieces through which it is told.
“One way of thinking about the show is as a meditation on the afterlife of an era that lives on in land, language, culture, objects, memory, people, ideas and law,” Inouye says. “The recognition that comes with this also lends us a certain degree of agency in our present.”
Rayyane Tabet: Exquisite Corpse at Sharjah Art Foundation until June 15
Photo: Fred Dott, Hamburg
