Dear friends of the Museum for Islamic Art,

We would like to invite you to a special guided tour with the Lebanese-German artist Said Baalbaki through the solo exhibition "Yesterday as Today" on 01 April 2023 from 5:30 pm in the Galerie Nord.
Following the guided tour, a reading - "Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh' ich wieder aus" - with actress Maria Hartmann on Jussuf Abbo will take place from 7 pm. 

Venue:
Galerie Nord | Kunstverein Tiergarten
Turmstrasse 75
10551 Berlin

Registration is required at info@fmik.de

The solo exhibition of the Lebanese-German artist Said Baalbaki shows a cross-section of his artistic work since he moved to Berlin-Moabit twenty years ago. Baalbaki combines painting and conceptual art, his thematic focus is the exploration of mechanisms of truth-finding and the construction of history. With the title Yesterday as Today, he refers to the parallelism and repetition of events in individual and social history.

Baalbaki presents paintings, sculptures and spatial installations: Arabic words formed from bronze belts and monolithic architectural fragments of various places of worship, built from coal briquettes, can be seen in Gallery North. In the two rooms Al Burak and Jussuf Abbo, he thematises the museum as an institution and its power in conveying history. He deconstructs and constructs historiography and myth-making by means of real and fictitious archaeological finds, objects and documents as a conundrum of historical research and fiction. With Al Burak, he simulates a museum space about the excavation site of Muhammad's legendary mount. With Jussuf Abbo, he reconstructs the tragic biography of the Palestinian-Jewish sculptor who lived in Berlin from 1913 to 1935.

Baalbaki, who lived through the Lebanese civil war, reflects across epochs on the dependence of the individual - the artist - on socio-political events, as is evident in his own biography and that of Jussuf Abbo.
He is a border crosser and mediator between Berlin and Beirut, and he creates a multi-layered fabric of historical research, transcultural poetry and artistic fiction.

Yours sincerely, Your Board

Irene Fellmann     Peter Heine     Nadia Nagie     Katja Şıdım     Cornelia Weber    Stefan Weber