Alia Hamaoui: Springboard

About

In a sequence of new works, Hamaoui combines painting and sculpture through an amalgam of disparate craft techniques: self-termed ‘constructions’ that explore the shifting material value of objects in the post-digital age. Presented with quasi-archeological tenor, artworks take the form of contemporary relics inspired by Phoencian reliefs and the cultural aesthetics of her childhood - a time spent split between Lebanon, France and England. Juxtaposing these forms with visual tropes such as pool rails, pigmented soap and digital prints on mesh, Hamaoui gestures toward the intimacy we feel with objects drawn from an imagined or symbolic past, intimating a chimeric landscape of cultural identity; one where modernist fable meets with contemporary ruin. An archeology of the future