The National published Afshan Ahmed's review Chafa Ghaddar's Dubai exhibition explores years of trauma with fresh take on frescoes on 19 April 2023. The article covers Beneath Latent Skies, the Lebanese artist's solo exhibition at Tabari in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which ran until 27 April 2023.
Ahmed traces Ghaddar's long engagement with fresco, from assisting industrial painters in plastering walls while studying at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in Beirut, where she graduated in 2009, to an intensive course in fresco and traditional painting in Florence in 2012. The exhibition brought together more than 40 new works, stripped from the wall and presented on Indian cotton paper layered with coffee, tea and mural stucco, on wood and on fabric. Skin, a peach toned, site specific fabric installation, hangs on a metal structure like a relaxed body, while Exhausted Forms, shown at the 16th Lyon Biennale, and Corps (2018) were also on view. Ghaddar links the return to the body and the peach tones to the past three years: "the Covid lockdown, the Beirut blast and the ongoing financial crisis." She also describes her parents' home in South Lebanon, whose walls must constantly be healed and primed, as her own interpretation of fresco.
Chafa Ghaddar lives and works in the UAE, where she has been a SEAF Fellow and part of Tashkeel's Critical Practice Programme. Beneath Latent Skies was her first solo exhibition with Tabari, and she is represented by the gallery.
