Alfred Tarazi was born in Beirut in 1980. In 2004, he graduated with a degree in graphic design from the American University of Beirut. In 2011 he completed a residency at Krinzinger Projekte in Vienna, and has held two solo shows since then with Galerie Krinzinger, one of Europe’s leading contemporary art galleries. His work has been shown internationally and collected by prestigious institutions and private collections. His entire body of work, ranging across painting, photography, drawing, digital collage, sculpture and installation, revolves around complex historical investigations into the ultimate event horizon of the Lebanese Civil War. Tarazi deploys his visual strategies in order to dig out fields of memory, emplaced haphazardly in a vast expanse of the present tense. A narrative emphasis occurs, at the root of which, he is unearthing critical and historical tools to read past events, provided by the past itself in the manner of a reluctant heritage. Tackling the Lebanese obsession with history, Tarazi playfully interrogates its questionable sources and selective archival practices, highlighting the role of the past as both origin and destination. With merciless realism intersecting both fiction and historiography, the artist articulates the spectacle of war as a syntax of the unimaginable, broken down piecemeal to a lived present. This archaeology of the now-time does not aim to restore, but rather, to represent a historical condition through fragments of anomaly and singularity. The field of representation, however, prevents distance and enclosure: It is a laboratory, a journal, a political inquiry, a memory site and a reality marker.
Contacts: