On June 13th XVA’s much anticipated Summer Collection opens, featuring work from Maitha Bin Demithan, Sameer Reddy, Saba Qizilbash and Nikolai Wiezorek (who all are making their debut at XVA), amongst others. Experience Emirati artist Maitha Bin Demithan’s dreamlike and poignant portraits that are created by using a flat bed scanner. Indian-American Sameer Reddy weaves highly iconic images into fantastical photo-based works that are a nod to his Indo-American heritage, offering commentary on the potent power of religious and mythical symbolism, and on a more personal level, the duality of his own cultural identity. Pakistani Saba Qizilbash’s brilliant paintings will astound viewers with their intricacy of detail, surprising imagery and masterful talent. German Nikolai Wiezorek’s photographs are an insightful visual narrative of Christmastime in Germany, made exotic to the extreme by exhibiting them at XVA during the hot, Arabian summer!
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Maitha bin Demithan
Artist statement:
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"I equate the need to create art with the need to breathe and eat. Art to me is a way of expression rather than an escape. There is a strong need in me to release the overwhelming stream of thoughts that flow inside of me. A need to share a place I only see, and a need to express ideas in a visual language. My hope is not to just continue creating art, but to create better art each time.
My work is usually based on my emotions, feelings and personal experiences. I enjoy photography, painting, drawing, digital art, illustration and currently exploring the world through a flat bed scanner. The human figure has always been of interest to me, and this unusual way of looking at it, especially with the absence of depth of field and 3D form, I have found it to be like a form of documentation, as if the figure was a document.
A flat bed scanner is normally used for the reproduction of two-dimensional images/documents or to make a copy from an original. In my pieces I have scanned figures in parts and then reconstructed the images digitally. The composite result is both an objective and mechanical record of the figures but also through pose, body language and particular scan quality also includes an emotional statement. |
My thoughts and feelings arise from the world in which I live, the environment I work in and most importantly, the people I am close to. I try to live each moment as it comes - fully with undivided attention - and feel that my art pieces reflect this. I feel that the deconstruction and reconstruction in my works are a reflection of my journeys, my own personal struggles to understand my state of being and my place and role in this world."
More on Maitha bin Demithan >>
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Saba Qizilbash
Artist statement
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Saba’s images explore the challenges of intimate relationships. In When they came for her in the garden, touches upon the anxieties of a caretaker protective of a loved one. The bee latched to a flower represents the symbiotic relationship between mother and child - interdependent and reliant on the other for nourishment and comfort. Great care must be taken in nurturing this relationship as pain and pleasure can often be two sides of the same coin.
In The Sting Operation, hostile jellyfish have been disarmed by being tied together like a bunch of gravity defying balloons. The use of pastel washes mimics a childlike attempt to color within the lines. All in all, maternal anxieties have been tied up in an effort to create a controlled environment - safe and free from danger. |
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Nikolai Wiezorek
Artist statement:
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"In GERMAN CHRISTMAS, I explored the exotic and highly entertaining world of German everyday street life at Christmas time. Christmastime is the season in year where the discrepancy between expectation and reality may be the strongest.
For me the appeal lay in the dense side by side of contradictions: commerce and emotion, desire for warmth (color red very dominant) and the frosty weather, the wish for community and the loneliness on the Christmas market, the exuberance while drinking hot wine punch together and sad people starring into the emptiness, humor and seriousness, lots of buying and eating, conserving the traditions, but the Nuremberg gingerbread out of industrial production, when the decoration isn't red, it's green for sure. A colorful exotic world, surprising and in any case fascinating." |
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Sameer Reddy
Artist statement:
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“My work investigates religious and mythical iconography, and questions their accepted values. Systems of belief yield an ultra-personal and potent set of symbols, yet they remain, for the most part, unchallenged or actively critiqued. With this set of images I have excavated subsurface meanings embedded in Hindu and Buddhist religious iconography with an eye to the role these gods and goddesses play in life of devotees. Lakshmi's gift of abundance is revealed to be of questionable value, with a malignant undercurrent. The Buddhist ideal of freedom from desire is contrasted with the mortal attachment to material wealth, highlighting the questionable ethics of many religious intermediaries, such as monks or priests. And Parvati's moral rectitude is seen as a potentially repressive force, achieved at the expense of personal and social truth.
On a personal level, the work is an attempt to locate my hybridized, Indo-American identity within my ancestral context. I've attempted to reshape these religious narratives to accommodate my self, both in terms of physical form and my beliefs about the role that religion plays. The airbrushed nature of the images is a nod to the notion of advertising, and a tacit recognition that market dynamics (buying and selling) are an essential strategy for the survival of religion. By co- opting a cosmetic ideal, the work is able to more effectively 'sell' its subversive, repackaged iconography to a viewership that might not be immediately receptive to its challenge to tradition.”
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