Which One is Your Thread by Noor Bahjat’s

Arts and Culture
Schedule/Venue

Galerie Stephanie

Libis
183 E. Rodriguez Jr. Ave., Libis, Quezon City
Metro Manila, Philippines

  • 28
    9:00 AM
    to  
    15
    6:00 PM

About the Event

There are a multitude of things flying and colliding in Noor Bahjat’s head that, if manifested as tangible bursts of pigment, patches of light or plaits and knits of intertwined color, her mind will resemble a riotous, vivid patchwork of endless quilt.

There are only two perpetual, all-encompassing truths in this world, according to the twenty-four year-old Syrian artist - love and death. “Which One Is Your Thread?” is Noor Bahjat’s first show here in the Philippines, and the exhibition is a culmination of her three-month artist residency here in Manila with Galerie Stephanie.

Projected upon her canvases are expressive daubs and strokes of paint that thrust and offer poignant musings and the most contemplative of gazes. Visually relayed by big, knowing expressive eyes they are ones that manage to appear glazed yet penetrating, and they hold and sustain you in some strange, hypnotic suspension.

Born and raised in Syria, her motherland’s current political condition has entailed her and her family to depart the country almost five years ago for the glimmering desert emirate of Dubai. She completed her Fine Arts degree with honors at the University of Damascus and her last exhibition and residency was held at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai. Noor is the first recipient of Galerie Stephanie’s first-ever artist-in-residency program. Since February, she has found herself embedded in the middle of this colorful megalopolis that is Manila, sometimes surrounded by oceans but always by spectral contradictions and feverish contrasts. “One of the very first things I saw in this country was how huge the gap between the rich and the poor is.” She paints a disquieting portrait of this searing observation in one of her paintings, a diptych with a contemplative woman, placed right at the very center of its middle edges. Noor uses the twin panels of the diptych to paint a portrait of a woman living two parallel, yet starkly different lives.

The woman personifies all of our kasambahay - kasama sa bahay - the one who lives with us in our homes, the one to whom we entrust our domestic concerns and household drudgery, the one who offers service to fulfill the work that we otherwise dismiss to be too menial and minutiae to do. One of her halves reside in a stately house, the other rides the jeepney, perhaps taking it to return to her own home. There are two inextricably intertwined—yet somehow irreconcilable—strands to the thread of her life. She is link and conduit between these two worlds, two parallel lives running together. It can be said that no one is exempt from this system; we actively participate in it as we employ and are employed in some way or another.

Underneath all the paved structures that link nations and civilizations, there is a latticed, highly complicated, multilayered network of virtual highways and of intangible threads and strings that link everything and nothing at the same time. This paradox works because this age has laid out right before us an intricate, ever-growing system of mindless consumption and minute gratification, blanketing us in both isolation and connection. It has turned consumption into a sport, and without the necessity of careful digestion. In the history of man, never have we ever been more connected, but never have we ever felt more isolated.

Noor Bahjat’s work takes us to confront this predicament as well. One of her portraits, reveal a woman who holds up her brain almost like an offering, as if to say, “I surrender it and it is now yours”. Bereft of hair and skin and scalp, exposed is a bloody cranium in which placidly sits, as if it were a hat, a jellyfish. Its placidity is deceitful. In all the twenty thousand leagues of the sea it is one of its most infamous, quintessentially dangerous beauties. It is beautifully hypnotic and translucent—diaphanous like floating tulle—and appended to this gossamer body is a set of tentacles, undulating here and there. It preoccupies you in a trance-like haze, and all at once you are in its clutch and grasp. An electric tingling first, then a sharp, agonizing white-hot sting follows next. It is a fitting metaphor for ‘the system’, an almost mythical, most pervasive power of man-made omnipotence that has deftly and seamlessly coiled and wrapped its tentacles around living, breathing things.

It is in this intricately veined, strung and threaded network of subliminal messages, force-fed information, mental and emotional conditioning that we are reminded at once of George Orwell’s prophetic tale, 1984. But what is perhaps most unsettling is that Orwell’s most famous work is no longer a prophecy. 1984 has already seen its fruition. It is here, and it is now. We are living, but have been devoid of life. Noor Bahjat is acutely aware of these changing times and declares: “I refuse to be brainwashed. I want to live my life the way nature intended me to”.

Noor Bahjat’s “Which One Is Your Thread?” opens on the 28th of April, 2016 at Galerie Stephanie, Unit 1B Parc Plaza Building, 183 Eulogio Rodriguez Jr. Ave, Diliman, Quezon City, 1110 Metro Manila, Philippines