ARTnews included Chafa Ghaddar among the standout artists of the 16th Biennale de Lyon in an unbylined list feature surveying works on view across the exhibition's venues. The entry focused on her contribution to the biennial's Manifesto of Fragility section, part of which was staged inside the Lugdunum Musee et theatres romains, an underground museum built into the city's Roman ruins, alongside work by other international artists included in the same survey.
The piece the article highlights, Exhausted Forms, is a roughly 132-pound sculpture built up from twelve layers of the stucco Ghaddar uses in her fresco practice, removed from its wall support and left slumped over a stone block so it reads as a discarded coat or a fold of skin. ARTnews describes the effect as "something fleshy, almost tender," language that matches Ghaddar's own account of the piece, in which folding the stucco risks cracking or breaking it, a fragility she treats as evidence that even a medium built for permanence remains subject to time.
Exhausted Forms was one of several fresco-derived stucco sculptures Chafa Ghaddar showed across the biennial's venues that year, extending a body of work that treats plaster as a skin-like membrane rather than a static wall surface. Her presentation at the 16th Lyon Biennale marked an early European survey moment for this material research, which she carried afterwards into solo and group presentations back in the Gulf, including with Tabari Artspace.
