Fresco is an awkward medium to carry across borders, and that difficulty shapes this conversation with Chafa Ghaddar, published by Selections within the same UAE-focused issue in which Tabari Artspace put questions to the artists on its roster. Lebanese and resident in the Emirates for roughly six years at the time, she talks about keeping a wall-based practice portable while moving between studios.
Much of the exchange turns on infrastructure. She has passed through Campus Art Dubai, Tashkeel's Critical Practice Programme and the SEAF fellowship in Abu Dhabi, and had held a Tashkeel studio for four or five years. A public commission awarded around Art Dubai in 2017, responding to the history and architecture of the Safa Library, had been held up by bureaucracy, and she argues that public art contracts do not properly account for an artist's labour and that affordable studio space deserves a far more serious conversation. Collaborators are named: the architect Zahra Mansoor, who designed the display for her first solo exhibition at Tabari, and the educator and poet Jill Maggie, with whom she made a spoken duet on the colour blue. Her subjects run through skin, body, landscape, time, nostalgia, motherhood, intimacy and violence, and she insists the work is never linear.
Beneath Latent Skies, installed at Tabari in 2023, sits behind the interview, which catches Chafa Ghaddar extending a gallery practice into commissioned public work while pressing for the conditions that would make it sustainable.
