Lawrie Shabibi is delighted to announce "Impossible Ordinary", Nadia Kaabi-Linke’s third solo exhibition in the gallery, featuring a new body of works, opening on Monday, 12 November.
Kaabi-Linke is a Berlin-based Tunisian/Ukranian artist whose practice is intertwined with socio-psychological topics: perception, memory, and geographically and politically constructed identities. Her work relates to places, spaces and surfaces – how the human presence shapes, has shaped and continues to shape their associations, moving between cities that include Berlin, Tunis, Paris, Dubai, and Kiev.
Basing this new group of work mainly on her experiences in Germany and in Tunisia, the title references the changes in contemporary life that seem at first unbelievable, and yet soon gain tacit acceptance. Amongst these moments of inspiration are her son’s childhood paintings, the image of a Tunisian girl at the beach, a discreetly repaired bullet-ridden wall in Berlin and a wall in Tunis bearing covert political inscriptions. In the process, Kaabi-Linke experiments with a wide array of everyday materials: peeled potato skin, liquid paper (“Tipp Ex”), manicure instruments, terra cotta tiles, and coloured pencils, using these familiar objects to explore the construction of the “new normal”.
