Despite their varied experiences and personal cultural backgrounds SoHyun Bae and

Fathi Hassan, have over the years evolved into artists whose respective works are governed by sensibilities rather than theories along with a clarity of vision that respond to and signifies current expanded parameters of art-making and cultural identity. As artists working in a milieu fraught with the possibilities of shifting, multiple and hybrid identities, they are acutely aware of the new challenges to the existing models for explaining the forms of belonging and patterns of exchange that the dynamics of globalization have wrought.

 

SoHyun Bae’s recent work is highly structured and reveals the aesthetic struggle between form and concept. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and material, combined with a sensitivity to texture and her remarkable ability to render figurative motifs perceptively and discerningly she creates work that suggest a close relationship to nature, to harmony and to growth thereby expanding the boundaries between art and consciousness. SoHyun Bae has received numerous awards, including a 2007John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fine Art, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 2002; Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2000; a Yaddo Fellowship in 2000; an NEA Fellowship at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 1996; and a full scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1993. Currently, she travels back and forth between New York City and Bologna, Italy.

 

History, geography and culture are mutable, imagined signs that Fathi Hassan often feels free to mix up and assign in his work in performance, installation, photography and painting. He explores the representational possibilities of language, inspired by texts from the Arabic calligraphy as core compositional elements. Although the texts in his work have no comprehensible meanings, it nevertheless serve as a specific link between image and writing whose aim is to give voice to Nubia’s lost oral tradition. Fathi Hassan was born to a Nubian family in Cairo, Egypt in 1957, where his family relocated after being displaced by the planned flooding during the construction of the Aswan Dam. He has often reflected upon this turmoil of displacement and dislocation in his works over the years. He studied at the School of Fine Art in Naples 1979-84, and has participated in several exhibitions in Africa, Europe and the USA including “Aperto 88” at the Venice Biennale 1988, 9th Cairo International Biennale in 2003, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in 2005, Dak’art – Dakar Biennial, Senegal 2008 and Villa Pisani, Stra. Venice, Italy, 2008