LARA BALADI

Lara Baladi works the reproducible image in various media and formats. Her installations, videos and collages, which often stage culturally hybrid scenes, are dense with mythology and visual theory. She addresses memory, both collective and personal, in a codified and multicultural language articulated in a world of shifting boundaries. Symbolic appropriations, legible as representations of primeval dreams, contribute to the construction of her numerous visual landscapes.

The works exhibited in the 8^th Sharjah Biennial are all enquiries into the notion of Paradise. They consist of two photomontages mirroring each other, Perfumes & Bazaar, The Garden of Allah and Justice for the Mother (working title); and her latest installation, Roba Vecchia, the Wheel of Fortune (Ragman).

The two photomontages are trompe l’oeils of walls in a living-room covered with wallpaper showing on one side a teeming garden of earthly delights and on the other jungle. They are filled with iconography ispired by representations of the Chateau de Versailles, waterfall lightboxes - direct reference to a "made-in-China" aesthetic - and photomontage posters of idealized landscapes. From out of these landscapes - populated by a variety of objects and people, imagery of the jungle, the wilderness, war and sexuality - Baladi's father rides his motorbike; away from his youth, his roots and the politics of the Middle East, towards the viewer, but also towards the commanding photograph of the artist's mother, here representing the original paradise, the womb.

Roba Vecchia, The Wheel of Forturne, is a life-sized kaleidoscope, which the viewer can enter and become a part of. The installation presents viewers with fragments of the artist's work, recomposed into a shifting array of kaleidoscopic images. The piece evokes the accumulation and reworking of leftovers of the past in a continuous rewriting of history. The artist worked with a computer programmer to create software that organizes the images in a pattern that mutates randomly so that the projected photographic images combine in an infinite and non-repetitive way. This is framed by the work's illusory, yet historically and culturally resonant sacred geometry, resembling stained glass windows, mandalas, arabesques, the microcosm of cellular life or the infinite night sky.

In the end, all three works are an invitation to the viewer to enter a transitional space and become the centre between opposite yet complementary poles and reconnect to his or her original "nature".