Eddie Abd, In There Finest, silk kafan #2 (detail), 2023. Courtesy: the artist and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Casula.
The unbearable right to see and be seen is a new major solo exhibition by artist Eddie Abd.
The exhibition explores the tension between self-representative image making and the gaze, inviting an examination of the values we assign to the images that we create and consume. Using both digital images and embroidery as medium and message, Abd’s works are a rendering of opposing notions converging: modern/ancestral, the homeland/country, the curated/mundane and the digital/tactile.
Abd is at an extremely exciting point in her career, having quickly built a recognised profile in Australia from her photo and video collage self-portraits. The work in this exhibition is characteristically loaded with imagery from her continued investigations into the act of portraiture and image making during human history. Reference and raw material include early photographic representation of Ottoman Greater Syria women by the French Bonfils studio, Vogue Arabia and pop culture imagery, personal family photographs and video filmed on Dharug Country and in Lebanon.
For Abd, this practice has become a powerful tool for making sense of herself and grappling with the experience of being in-between, being a mother, and an artist born in Lebanon and currently living on Dharug Country. For audiences, in a world where image making and consumption is almost habitual and often unthinking, this practice asks challenging questions. Why do we choose to represent ourselves the way we do and how do we see ourselves against the images that have made us?
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