If.... Rabab Ghazoul

About

G39 invites the acclaimed Cardiff based artist Rabab Ghazoul to continue If…., a programme of exhibitions giving artists and curators opportunites to show new work to a new audience. Combining text, film and altered objects, Rabab often creates installations that call into question the values and hierarchies of society. Rabab harbours an intensely revolutionary yearning. Whilst not overtly visible, it underpins the body of a creative practice that manifests across a variety of media, to include video, installation, text, performance and site-based work. Rabab was born and spent her childhood in Iraq. This experience of living in two cultures informs her approach as a social observer and commentator, producing work in response to a variety of fractures, triggers or notions — politics, history, territory, community, homeland — drawing her both into and beyond realms of cultural identity and personal narrative. Often reflecting upon the effects of late capitalist culture through which we continue to rehearse our prescribed and ritualistic movements, her work is interested in locating the ‘truthfulness' amidst the ongoing consumption of private and public texts. For If…. Rabab will reinterpret and restage, within Cardiff City Centre, the artist Oyvind Fahlstrom's 1966 work Mao-Hope-March. This performance work, and the 16mm film which documents it, consisted of a pseudo-protest in which Fahlstrom and a group of his friends walk through the streets of New York carrying large placards bearing the photographs of Bob Hope and Mao-Tse-tung, whilst an interviewer recorded the responses of passers-by, and their answers to the question, ‘do you consider yourself to be happy?' Rabab will invite people to recast notions of the political and cultural icon for the 21st century and reenact After Mao-Hope to gage the happiness of the people.