Omar Khouri
Omar Khouri is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, comics, music and others. In 2006, he co-founded Samandal Comics, the first experimental comics collective in the Middle East credited for starting the recent comic book revolution in the Arab world. Khouri’s work has been exhibited and is held in collections around the world including Lebanon, the UK, the US, Japan, and across Europe. Recent shows include ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ (2019 – 2020) at the BAR Project Space, Beirut, ‘Glass’ (2018 - 2019) at the Park Gallery, London, and ‘Face Value: Portraiture’ (2018) a group show at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut. He currently lives and works in North Lebanon.
Exhibitionist
Exhibitionist is a site-specific installation by Omar Khouri that questions the way art is experienced and consumed. To the artist, the glass represents the conceptual barriers placed between the artworks and their potential viewer, alienating and rejecting a large number of them, and imposing a specific sterilized mode of consumption upon the rest. By removing the glass that separates the gallery from the sidewalk and allowing unsupervised, around the clock access to the paintings inside, Khouri attempts to reject these restrictions that are prevalent in the art world today that minimize the profundity and transcendence of experiencing Art. The installation also calls into question the hyper-consumerist nature of the art market, sparking discussions about value versus price and private ownership versus public access among other things. A surveillance camera was placed in the space to capture interactions, and the footage was edited down to one hour and twenty minute video projected for the public at the closing event.