Mohamad Abdouni

Over the years, he has interwoven a network of relationships and photographic images that connects him to figures who are repositories of memory, to their archives, and to the people they portray. He fills the voids and silences in their accounts with fictional elements he develops using AI and new technologies.

For his solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, the Lebanese artist pursues this research, this time through an introspective approach that delves into his personal history. 

Soft Skills provides a “return to the homeland”, the Bekaa region of Lebanon, focusing on his childhood, a temporal and spatial fabric of often narrow, normative masculinity. As an adult, he now embodies a future that the child he once was struggled to envision, looking back on a past mingling blissful nostalgia and a solemnity tinged with humour. 

As he reviews his family's figures, archives, and trinkets, recalling the mythical or monstrous characters who still inhabit his imagination, the artist re-examines his queer boy desires, an impossible embodiment of the norms of heterosexual masculinity or the homo-eroticism of camaraderie. This queer (re)reading of “soft skills” is a jubilant reinvention of new ways of behaving and being in different contexts.

Curator: Caroline Honorien

With Usbek & Rica and Manifesto XXI

Cover image credit: View of Mohamad Abdouni's Soft Skills exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations © Aurélien Mole

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Mohamad Abdouni is the laureate of the 2023 Production Support from Lafayette Anticipations, awarded to one of the artists of the Galeries Émergentes sector of Paris+ par Art Basel, renamed Emergence Sector of Art Basel Paris in 2024.