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The Future Generation Art Prize 2012 Special Prize Winner
Rayyane Tabet was born in 1983 in Ashqout, Lebanon. He received a Bachelor in Architecture from the Cooper Union and a Master in Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego. His work has been featured in Art Now in Lebanon, Darat al Funun, Amman (2008) and in the book Younger than Jesus: The Artist Directory, published by Phaidon Press (2009). Tabet was included in Plot for a Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011) and The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York (2012).
Rayyane Tabet’s artistic practise starts from personal objects that offer a reflection on the social and historical context of life in Lebanon. The artist reveals the hidden history of these objects by recreating and transforming them. He abstracts the personal experience, so the object’s underlying personal memories solidify into a social memory, of the kind that made an impact on the development of Lebanon’s shifting society.
Watch the works and the video profile of the artist
Following a childhood memory, Tabet has created a new installation for the PinchukArtCentre that consists of a field of over 4,000 wood block toys cast in concrete. The work lives from a poetic tension between the fragile building blocks and the stability and strength of the material. The multiplication of this toy set means an abstraction of the personal memory. On the one hand it suggests building an eternal ruin, on the other the ossification of child-like imagination.
“The jury awards Rayyane Tabet a special prize for his close examination and intelligent articulation of the complex social and historical context of his home in Lebanon. Referencing architectural languages, Tabet succeeds in transforming and communicating an intimate and personal experience to a wider public, by multiplying an original wooden toy set to become a field of 12,000 concrete sculptural copies of its parts, an abstract and urban landscape of models.”
