Hunna Art presents ‘So expansive, you and I become null,’ a solo Exhibition by Raya Kassisieh curated by Nadine Khalil, opening December 4, 2024. Under the patronage of Ambassador of the State of Palestine, Rami Tahboub.
In her first solo exhibition, Raya Kassisieh employs different languages, visible and invisible through her own writing, gestures and different drafts on the body. By moulding these to different scales, from the ultra-minute to the expansive and distorted, she expresses that the act of becoming is also a gesture towards unravelling.
The title is taken from a prose poem by Kassisieh that states, "That space of spaciousness, so expansive, you and I become null. Where flesh comes apart, broken down, dissolved in matter until it turns light. A yearning to leave the body; the body, so lived-in…” Her text is about an immersion in water, the sensation of floating being an apt place to begin for an artist who attempts to collapse the divisions between personhood and objecthood through her body.
In her works, flesh is materialized and the physical body becomes a deep well to dig into, a living archive from which emotional longings and familial lineages can be traced. Hence the body she carries is not singular, and in her works she evokes memories of the imprints of others, often manipulated in material and scale. It is as if she is asking, how do you contain the uncontainable?
Three central works in the exhibition, which draw on Kassisieh’s early training in textiles, are an ode to her late grandmother Claudette, an icon of femininity and love, who she grieves. Do you see her?(I), incorporates an archival image of Claudette on a 1950s vintage corset they bought together from a Friday flea market in Amman. Claudette’s face emerges from her ghostly figure against dark foliage, embedding the need to hold an image couched with loss, like the undergarment meant to hold an upper body in place, contorted into composure.
Kassisieh often operates between such dualities: boundaries and fluidity, ecstasy and grief, expansion and void. With sharp thorns that curl back, You are more than the world to me, my eyes will never tire of seeing you is a totemic contemplation of the dark feminine, of Nature Morte – life at the edge of death. Seven small dark rose sculptures are presented as daily offerings to the one who always surrounded herself with flowers.
Visual references to plant life appear in Before I knew her, a series of copper plates featuring images from the family archive (1940s-60s). The steadfast rose emerges between limestone blocks in one image, and in Claudette’s hands at the entrance of her home in another. This is a work meant to be touched, as the copper will meet one’s body temperature. Claudette is another tactile overture by the artist, this time on silky organza, where her grandmother’s profile is tripled. A slice of her features revealed via a mirror reflection is the only frontal view. Kassisieh evokes a fragmented memory through the supple tactility and multiplicity of portraiture, like an image that refuses to be wholly captured. This unsettled gaze culminates in Kassisieh’s self-portrait, Bad Dreams, in which the three-sided perspective of the artist’s face is a vignette of the spectrum of feeling.
For Kassisieh, the act of mourning is not just personal. It encompasses a deep sorrow for the collective. The visual memory of a father carrying his son’s remains in a plastic bag during Israel’s ongoing genocide against Gaza sparked her trio of sculptures An embrace, Rested friends and Stacked, a mound of us. Huddled like a mass and yet small enough to be held in both hands, they are a powerful meditation on what it means to be a body: reduced, discarded and disposable, akin to Agamben’s notion of a ‘bare life’ but also, a life made bare.
Meanwhile in her bronze figures, Close, Closer and Closed, Kassisieh embraces a body pillow modeled on her own body after it was wrapped and duct-taped at a previous moment in time. It represents a poignant embrace of the lost parts of oneself, a closeness that is cut off and lifeless. Nearby, I lay bare sees Kassisieh pressed, distended and suspended against glass.
Earlier works in the show are less figurative and more abstract drawings, including gestures (small) largely in color and the monochrome Man-hours, where she merges gestures with a sense of erasure or void, the dichotomy between creation and destruction. Her tapestries on the other hand depict the rich expansiveness of nature tinged with eco-grief, particularly, that surrounding the erosion of ancient sites in Tabaqat Fahil in Jordan.
This understanding of the boundlessness of the sublime mixed with deep pathos and longing for what was is an understanding the artist holds and transcends, through her body. So expansive you and I become null.
Raya Kassisieh (b. 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the politics of the body through drawing, painting, sculpture, and welding. Informed by her Palestinian heritage and upbringing in Amman, her work captures nuanced narratives of identity, autonomy, and collective memory, often inspired by her grandmother’s photographic archive.
