His recent work OMAR MISMAR (Lebanon, 1986) explores the meaning and ability of gestures in spaces of political conflict. Between the aestheticization of experienced realities and the instrumentalization of aesthetic sensibilities, what space should be occupied? Using a poetic approach, Mismar’s work deals with conflict and its possibilities of representation. He has a master’s degree in fine arts and visual and critical studies from the California College of the Arts and is an assistant professor at the American University of Beirut. His works have been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Beirut. He received the Student Fulbright Award, Barclay Simpson Award, AICAD Scholarship, Violet Jabara Trust Grant and was awarded the residency programs Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SOMA and Montalvo.
In the work SCHMITT, YOU AND ME (2016-2017), on striking up a friendship with the owner and the manager of a gun shop in Skowhegan, Maine, and being taken to a firing range, the artist asks them to read aloud excerpts from the work “The Concept of the Political” by Carl Schmitt, a controversial jurist known for his ties with the Nazi regime. As the protagonists read and reread the historical German text on violence, power, the role of friend/enemy, the viewer becomes aware of the potential conceptual and political pitfalls created by Schmitt’s ideas, which reverberate widely in present times.
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