Lara Baladi
Photomontage. Dimensions and materials variable. 2024.
With the second edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale opening on January 25th (we’ll share insights on it after it opens), and the 1-54 Art Fair returning to Marrakesh on January 30th, the new year is already offering its share of inspiration.
We’re celebrating the beginning of 2025 with a very special treat. A dialogue with an artist whose work has inspired me and many more for decades. She will show new works during the 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair in Marrakesh.
Lara Baladi is an acclaimed multimedia artist, photographer, archivist and educator. While Lara’s singular talents spark insightful commentaries using Arab culture to create universal narratives, her work transcends geographical specificity.
Lara was raised in Beirut, Cairo, Paris and London. She lived in Egypt, in Japan and more recently in Boston (MA) in the US where she first was an Open Documentary Fellow at MIT , then a Lecturer in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology from 2014 to 2023. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Practice in Visual Arts, at The American University in Cairo.
Since 2011, she has produced and continues to create artworks under the umbrella title, Vox Populi, Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age. Each project, sculptures, time based media events, or essays), perform the Tahrir Archives—an archive of articles, images, videos and data related to Arab uprisings and global social movements—which she began to gather during the Egyptian uprisings.
In January 2025, at Malhoun in Marrakesh, as part of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Baladi will present, E + ducere, To Lead or To Draw Out, the first chapter of a sequence of exhibitions related to Anatomy of Revolution, an ABC and Archive of Revolting, a web based artwork and multimedia installation, the culmination project of over a decade of research on the iconography of protest.
It would be too long to list all of Lara’s works here which span over three decades. They include, among many others, a 29-meter circumference installation at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery in 2002, titled Al Fanous el Sehry (Arabic, The Magic Lantern), which addressed the repetition of cycles in History, and Sandouk El Dounia (Arabic, The World in a Box) a large-scale tapestry—woven via a digitally operated loom— shown at the Venice Biennale in 2011, in the exhibition Penelope’s Labour.
During the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Lara co-founded two media initiatives, Radio Tahrir, an FM radio station which became the first free online radio in Egypt, and Tahrir Cinema, which she founded with the media initiative Mosireen.
Her participations in shows at the Fondation Cartier, Centre Pompidou, Grand Palais in Paris or at the Kennedy Art Center, in Washington DC, were among my favorites.
Lara’s vision always manages to celebrate her Lebanese Egyptian heritage, blending meticulous research with poetry, humor and a sense of emergency.
Lara is a longtime friend. I’m super honored that she accepted to answer some of my questions and help us all on our endless quest for something resembling truth and elevation.
Bonjour Habebti Lara! Lara you’re my first guest in this Journal, How are you feeling today?
Dearest Omar, thank you for this wonderful opportunity to have this conversation here. I am honored to be your first guest and wish you great success for this new endeavor.
Today is Christmas day. I am writing from Lebanon. It feels great to be reunited with my family after the last few months of war that the country has been through.
You’re an artist and a teacher. I don’t really know exactly what I am since I struggle to call myself a designer but since this is a space dedicated to sharing, to culture, creativity and well also to design, can I ask you what the word design evokes to you and if you think it is important to separate Art and Design?
It would be good to define ‘design.’ I am assuming you are talking about the kind of design you do, the kind that flirts with sculpture? I would say that in most cases, design of objects or graphic design, as opposed to art, inherently suggests a commercial purpose. Designers typically operate within the constraints set by clients’ briefs, while artists often work independently and creatively, even, and especially, when commissioned to produce an artwork. Design often integrates within an environment, typically serving decorative purposes, while art, or should I say, good art, strives to distinguish itself, and encourage viewers to shift their perspectives on specific issues. There is a fine line between Design and Art. While
art can adopt design strategies, when Design uses artistic strategies, it transforms into art.
Out of all the memorable works you’ve shared with the world, which is your favorite and why?
One of my best memories of making art was the production, in 2006, of Roba Vecchia (Italian, Ragman), an immersive life-size kaleido scope, using mirrors, rear projection and specially designed software. Created in 2006, it was at once a response to the six months research I did in Japan in 2003 and to my pressing need to redefine photography in its transition from analogue to digital. This project, in every stage of its making, was challenging and exciting to create. For example, installing the artwork began in the midst of a ‘khamsin’ (Arabic, sandstorm). Then, on the last day before the opening, just outside the gallery, cars were honking, and people were singing everywhere in the streets. Inside the gallery, where my team had set up a TV and enough chairs for a an audience of twenty, between installing
the mirrored structure and making sure the algorithm was well functioning, we watched Egypt’s fifth victory over Ivory Coast in the Africa Cup of nations.
Tower of Hope is one my favorites. Could you please remind us what that installation was and what you were trying to express with it?
Borg El Amal, (Arabic, Tower of Hope), an architectural construction and sound installation was a work I did in response to a commission to represent Egypt in the 2008-2009 Cairo Contemporary Art Biennale. The theme for that year was “The Others.” My father had passed away a couple of months earlier. In my grief, I identified strongly to the state of sadness and despair of Cairo’s slums, commonly known as ashway’iyat (Arabic, ‘haphazard things’). Borg El Amal became a project about people living in these slums, a “monument to the poor,” as a dear friend called it: a donkey symphony playing in a tower built on one of the most expensive and central, state own piece of land, the Cairo Opera House.
I remember walking in a truly magical little room with the most whimsical and beautiful video and sound installation at the Grand Palais for a show that was produced by Dior. Can you refresh my memory on that piece and tell me what became of that beautiful installation?
This was Don’t Touch Me Tomatoes & Chachacha, a video installation commissioned in 2014, by Christian Dior for the exhibition Miss Dior. In 2012-13, in Egypt, during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, there was a disturbing number of mob rapes and sexual harassment mostly happening in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. As a reaction, I felt the urgency to give tribute to women who had historically been, and continued to be, examples of strength, resilience, courage and beauty, and to politically engaged female activists. The immersive 7.1 surround sound video installation, Don’t Touch Me Tomatoes & Chachacha (title borrowed from Josephine Parker’s songs remixed and published on YouTube), invited the viewer in a world where fireflies are women illuminating the world, even if for an instant.
What do you think of Egypt’s Art market?
It is encouraging to see the growing interest in the arts, particularly contemporary art, over the last two decades. However, much work remains to be done for people to recognize that art can be collected in forms other than painting and for purposes beyond decorating their homes.
Do you think it’s ok to try to develop a Design market with collectible pieces costing the price of a car in a country where more than 30% of the population lives in poverty and most struggle to get proper education and health care?
No! This is just another folly, symptomatic of the hyper neo-capitalist world we live in.
Do you think teaching in a classroom is comparable to creating art? Which do you prefer?
I love teaching. It has been one of the most rewarding endeavors I have dedicated myself to in the last fifteen years. Teaching requires a lot of preparation and rigor but also creativity, spontaneity and passion. The latter is also one of the most important ingredients for creating art. I do not see them as separate. I believe teaching and creating art are interconnected, they feed onto each other and are
both part of one singular artistic journey.
Do you mind telling us a bit about your upcoming show at Malhoun for the 1-54 Art Fair?
Malhoun is a pluri-disciplinary experimental venue combining a gallery space, an open-air cinema and studios for young Moroccan artists. It was founded in 2020 by my dear friends, Samya Abid and Eric Van Hove. This wonderful initiative aims to support local artists and to show works by artists from the Arab region and Africa. Eric and I met in Tokyo in 2003. Last year, I returned to Morrocco for the first time since 2002 to see Samya and him. This is when we started collaborating on creating wood and copper sculptures with Fenduq, their local production facility, and discussing a potential show at Malhoun for 2025..
E + ducere, To Lead or To Draw Out, the title of my upcoming exhibition, is one of many chapters (or series of exhibitions), that stem from my current project Anatomy of Revolution, an ABC and Archive of Revolting. One of the features and mission of the project being to serve as an educational platform, E + ducere, To Lead or To Draw Out will focus on the word ‘education’ as it appears in the ABC under the Arabic ‘ta’ and, will address letter the fine line between education and indoctrination.
What are your hopes for 2025?
Justice and peace for the world.
RAPID ROUND:
Name an artist?
Marcel Broodthaers
Name an artwork?
Le Corbeau et le Renard. 16 mm film, color, silent, 7 min 56 s. Marcel Broodthaers, 1967.
Name a book and its author?
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt
Name a City?
Cairo of course!
Can you name a designer?
Ruben Pater (Artist-Designer). I especially love his Borders of the World Notebooks.
Name a dish?
My grandmother’s ‘molokheya’
Name a song?
Sawah, by Abdel Halim Hafez
Thank you my Love, What a treat!
Thank you all for reading!! I hope this brings inspiration and helpful insights.
Happy January!
Omar
More About Lara Baladi here
