The National published a review by Afshan Ahmed on 19 April 2023 of Chafa Ghaddar's solo exhibition Beneath Latent Skies, staged at Tabari Artspace in the Dubai International Financial Centre. The piece situates the show within Ghaddar's ongoing reworking of fresco technique, describing an exhibition of more than forty new works made in the period leading up to the opening and running through 27 April 2023.
Ahmed singles out Skin, a site-specific fabric installation stretched over a metal armature, alongside pieces titled Soft is the Night 2, The Lovers, Mountains and Studies of Grass 6, and references Corps, 2018, and Exhausted Forms, the stucco sculpture Ghaddar had shown at the 2022 Lyon Biennale. The works combine Indian cotton paper layered with coffee, tea and mural stucco with wood-mounted canvases in fleshy, peachy and off-white tones, a palette the article links to Ghaddar's processing of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 Beirut port explosion and Lebanon's financial collapse. Ghaddar is quoted describing her expanded sense of the wall: "There is the entire other understanding of what a wall can be... I am interested in the fluid aspect of a wall."
Beneath Latent Skies marked Chafa Ghaddar's most extensive solo presentation with Tabari Artspace to date, moving her fresco-based practice off the wall and onto fabric, paper and freestanding wooden supports. It sits between her 2022 appearance at the Lyon Biennale and her later public and institutional commissions, and remains a useful single survey of how she translates memory and trauma into surface and colour.
