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Best Curated Exhibition - 2025
Best Curated Exhibition - 2025
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Taghreed Dargouth
Taghreed Dargouth
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He Who Gazes at the Sea: Man and the Land. |
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Exhibited at Saleh Barakat Gallery |
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The artist stages a poignant meditation on displacement, identity, and fractured belonging. Known for her emotionally charged and politically resonant works, she extends her inquiry into the relationship between land, memory, and loss, through a deeply personal yet universally relatable lens.
The exhibition unfolds across five thematic chapters, each weaving together visual impressions of Lebanon’s natural and symbolic, but cliché landmarks: cedar trees, mountain ridges, ancient ruins, coastal rocks, and the iconic silos of Beirut’s port. They are rendered in bold, expressionist strokes and feverish colors. The brushwork evokes emotional turbulence: layered, impulsive, and unsettled, as if each canvas was caught between eruption and erosion. Beneath luminous blues and fiery earth tones, are embedded landscapes with latent anxiety, nostalgia, and a longing that refuses to resolve.
At the heart of the exhibition lies the figure of ‘the emigrant’, embodied by the statue facing Beirut’s devastated port, who stares at the sea with a desire to escape. The motif becomes a metaphor for the country’s collective emotional state: a population suspended between flight and rootedness, between mourning what was lost and resisting what might come. In this ambiguity, the artist has captured the trauma of a people unsure of its future, and perhaps more painfully, uncertain of its past.
Personal and collective grief overlaps in her depiction of places both sacred and ordinary. The silos, now emblematic of Beirut’s collapse, mirror the erosion of the very idea of home. Through visual metaphors like sunburnt columns and ghostlike cedars, her work becomes less about landscape than about inner terrain where memory is slippery, and beauty is inseparable from pain.
The exhibition feels like a show by a tour guide, where the guide is an artist who, though exiled from her Beirut studio, continues to paint as a way of holding the ruins together. What remains is not a portrait of a country, but an elegy to its unspoken questions. She doesn’t answer them, just renders them visible.
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