The Dialectic of Art and Politics in Youssef Abdelke's Work
2009/17
Lecture
The text was written in 2009, during the great political and social shutdown in Syria. The lecture was given on 27 July 2017 at Villa Romana, Florence.
Bassel Al Saadi
Bassel Al Saadi, born in 1971, studied at the Institute of Applied Arts in Damascus until 1995. In his metal sculptures he initially dealt with the concepts of emptiness and the figuration of the human head. For more than eight years the focus of his work has been the box, the cube, as part of confronting the works of Louise Nevelson, Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell. For Al Saadi the box is a safe space, a womb, a personal space. It is also a space that can be occupied if the public space is inaccessible. In late 2010 there followed new works, in which he used metal plates as a painting surface. Since 2017 Bassel Al Saadi lives in Italy.