Agial Gallery, Beirut
April – May 2024
The work of Sara Badr Schmidt defies neat categorisation. Working with an eclectic range of materials and processes, connected by an insistent return to the multiplicity of identity, and an equally strong care for the artisanal, for craft and for the hand, she delves into her intimate world with the precision of a surgeon, the tenderness of a parent. This tension of precision and care grounds the work, leaving a space through which the viewer can climb. From where you begin, from your own journey, you can enter her world.
This is Badr Schmidt’s third exhibition at Agial gallery in a relationship spanning more than twenty years. Our deep connection with this artist continues to enrich our programming, as well as providing fuel for our understanding of home, of Beirut, and our place in the wider world. In fact, ‘We left home’ is perhaps Badr Schmidt’s most ambitious project to date, taking personal stories and cultural myth, and re-imagining them, creating new connections that remix belonging for those who connect with more than one place, one way of being.
In a global world, place remains important, but how that is understood is always in development. Badr Schmidt takes the work of belonging as her centre, drawing on her experience as Lebanese, Swedish and French, of being continually a little outside, of leaving, of the way that place imprints itself in ways that should be impossible to decode – and yet that is what she does. Don’t imagine that the many threads woven into this story will reach a neat conclusion, a certain meaning. Instead, they are an opportunity to delve deeper into the emotional and thoughtful world of human belonging.
Seen through the eyes of this prescient artist, place, belonging, identity, in all of their complexity, gain intimacy and individuality while at the same time speaking to the broader social and cultural issues that they equally pertain to.
Where is your place in this unfolding story? This artist has a gift for allowing stories to unfold from every viewer, connecting the work of memory with that of tangible reality.