EXHIBITIONS
The binaries of Hady Sy walk and stand and lie down singly and together, take on numerous tiny formations, find their way along branches, form trunks. Similar shapes merge together as the difference of scale and action creates texture at once whole and wholly unique.
Sy says of his interest in artificial intelligence that we are already in the world of AI, it is just a case of when it enters us fully and to whom it happens first. This is a story that he wants to tell, an integration of binary, code, the world of computers, into the human, nature.
Human Inc. seeks a coming to terms with this connection of machine and nature. This is a beginning that is not a beginning, a start from where we already are, an attempt to comprehend a path that has drawn Sy closer to nature, and to his own hands.
For Sy, the line between technology and human ethics is becoming ever-more critical. This dilemma is laid bare in his new body of work. Where his previous exhibition warned of humans becoming only numbers in the eyes of consumer society, Human Inc. shows our strength, that we are much more than a poor entity, not disposable and not able to be replaced by more efficient structures.
Hady Sy (b. Beirut, 1964) is a French-Senegalese multidisciplinary artist whose work brings together social, existential, and geopolitical concerns through a lens of idealistic humanism. In 1982, Sy enrolled at the department of Communication Arts at Beirut University College, before moving to France, where he earned a Master’s degree in Image et Média at the École Française des Attachés de Presse (EFAP).
Sy has exhibited widely, with solo shows in Beirut, Berlin, Dubai, Kuwait, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, Paris, and Saint Petersburg. His work is held in major public and private collections. In Paris, the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) acquired his sculptures in September 2021, and the Bibliothèque de l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts received his book-object LOVE BIBLE - Le Marégramme de l’Amour in December 2019.
In Beirut, the Archaeological Museum of the American University of Beirut featured his sculpture The Acrobats (2025) and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) has acquired several of his works, among them Zero (2014); Al Khawarizmi (2015); Made in Lebanon (2015); It, They, She (2022) and Still Standing Always (911) (2022).
Drawing is central to Bassam Khawaji’s practice, used primarily as a preliminary tool to put out into the world what is inside, and to gain a formal relation to his internal world through that process. His compositions in paint, as well as the relief works of wire and plaster on display in the Upper Gallery, are shaped through this systematic drawing process, the white reliefs highlighting the simplicity of form before colour, when shape is the key axis. Pulling away from the paper but not yet emerging onto canvas, wire lines become simple forms, encased then in thick white coverings. These works might be first sketches, and yet they speak a language that is complete, formed from the manipulation of wire which is frame and support as well as composition and line.
In the world-making of Doreen El Zein, apparently peaceful shapes morph easily towards form, but rarely reach a recognisable state. A fluid translucence pervades the whole, unconcerned by shifts in colour and tone, guided rather by changes in temperature, the swaying depths of warmth and cold.
Indeed, in the spaces that she shapes between the forms of fire and water, a contrast begins to emerge, a movement between warm and cool, a heat that burns at the base or the centre, licking the edges of caves and watery hollows
In this way, Zein’s gentle painterly expression is tempered by an intensity of contrast, revealing its depth over time, through looking and allowing spaces to exist inside and around each other, and through this gaining a sense of her process. If her gift is in the continual morphing of form, the unending wonder of what a form might reach, she comes to terms with her peace in the relationship with intensity, the darkness inside the light.
What water quenches those fires, or refuses to let them die, what peace is disturbed by muted, mutable darkness.
Beginning her career in special paint effects and furniture finishing, her work has evolved to include painting and sculpture in mixed media with a focus on paintings developed through densely layered multi-media washes that at times give way to transparent overlapping veils of colour expressing her inner world.
She held her first solo exhibition at Agial Art Gallery in Beirut in 2017 and has participated in various group exhibitions including Visual Art Forum, Unesco Palace (2016); Lebanese American University Fine Arts Alumni Biennale, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); Prolekult, American University of Beirut, Beirut Lebanon, 2016; Vento d Oriente, Venice Italy, 2016; Rebirth of a Nation, Beirut Exhibition Center (2015); International Women’s Day, Haigazian University Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon (2013); Hamazkayin Gallery (2012, 2016); Schizzo gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2014) and Rochane art gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2012). Her work is held in a number of private collections.