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).
The work of Yasmina Nysten tends towards the face, portraits that combine large swathes of muted colour with quick swatches of unapologetic brightness. Her sensitivity to contrast plays out also in the wider environs of her paintings, including objects so casually yet carefully placed we cannot but imagine they have some specific meaning, a relation to the face beside them, the body resting, the shifted world the artist creates. Pattern, when used, is dedicated, honours the way the world can catch on a moment, the light can catch, the world becoming for a second all pattern, all flecks and small, shifting subtleties. The world here divides into parts and pattern, more than light, brights and darks. There is a recognisable and an unrecognisable part, a clear brush stroke, a face formed from parts, what else forms a face except reality has no brush, or it is harder to see the strokes. In Nysten’s words these portraits ‘do not speak a language; rather, they teeter on the edge of a message. They offer only their ground: an absolute, silent being-there that confronts us at the very limit of what can be seen’.
