Exhibition

Mohamad Abdouni | Soft Skills

Mohamad Abdouni is dedicated to preserving incomplete histories or those on the verge of disappearance. 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.

Mohamad Abdouni is an artist, photographer, filmmaker and curator based between Beirut and Istanbul. He is also Editor in-Chief and Creative Director of COLD CUTS magazine, the photo journal exploring queer cultures in the SWANA region.

His work has been exhibited namely at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the FOAM Gallery in Amsterdam, L’Institut du Monde Arab, Art Basel by Paris+ and the Institute of Islamic Cultures in Paris, Patel Brown in Toronto, and the Lyon Biennale amongst others. 

Mohamad’s films have been screened and awarded at festivals such as Eyes Wide Open and the Leeds Queer Film Festival in the UK, IQMF in Amsterdam, The Brooklyn Museum and Woodbury LGBTQ Film Festival in the US, and Pink Apple Schwullesbisches Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in Switzerland to name a few. 

Commercially, he has shot for and directed narrative fashion films and music videos with the likes of Gucci, Vogue US, Vogue Italia, Burberry, Puma, The New York Times, Slate, Fendi, Farfetch, GQ, King Kong, Dazed, Another, Nowness, Vice UK and L’officiel. 

His personal endeavors tend to focus on the untold stories of Beirut and uncovering the rich yet eradicated queer histories of the Arab-speaking region through several documentaries and photo stories that have been featured in publications from A24, Telerama, Foam Magazine, Tetu, New Queer Photography, Kaleidoscope, i-D, Photoworks, The Guardian, Facebook and more. 

As of 2019, he has dedicated his time to working on what is arguably the first archive of trans* histories in an Arab country, a project entitled Treat Me Like Your Mother: Trans* Histories From Beirut’s Forgotten Past. The collection resides safely today at the Arab Image Foundation. 

Recently, he’s been working on a long-term project that delves deeper into the town he grew up in, in the Bekaa of Lebanon bordering with Syria, presenting questions around the ideals of masculinity that he was meant to embody, and the strains that such expectations can have on interfamilial relationships.

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