RASHA KAHIL'S DOMESTICATED BODIES
Graphic designer and photographer, Rasha Kahil exposes the human body.
She domesticates it. She immortalizes it. In snapshots that are simultaneously indecent and amusing.
She is barely just 30 years old. Black hair cut in a bob, doe-shaped eyes of a mint green color, olive skin riddled with tattoos, the young girl is a well-balanced mixture of gothic and romantic. Her 'trendy artist' look could lead us to imagine her work to be strenuous and mincing. Well, not at all. Although conceptual, her work remains accessible to the most common of mortals.
The ordinary? The banal? The everyday? She seeks it, sublimes and exposes it, in all honesty. Without taboos. Without artifices, nor superfluousness. It is her photographic style. It is her. Quite simply.
Six years ago, with her Graphic Design diploma from AUB firmly in hand, Rasha Kahil landed in London to pursue a masters in Communication Art and Design at the Royal College of Art. Her final year projects work around photography, video and installation. "This is how my love for photography was rekindled", she says in a perfect French.
In the British capital, Kahil felt like a fish in water. Or rather like milk in a cup of tea. In parallel to her studies, she collaborated as a designer, then a photographer for cult magazine Dazed & Confused. She has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts (GSK Contemporary) and the British Film Institute. She has also shown in collective exhibitions at the Running Horse contemporary art space in Beirut.
Since she considers graphic design as her bread and butter, it is rather photography that allows her the possibility to explore an intimate space of creation, of reflexion, a new form of expression.
Her favored themes? "The dichotomy between the public and the private, the use of the body as subject and object, to explore the Auto/Biographical" she writes on her website. "The body becomes a means for investigating displacement, social identity and its manifestation through everyday performance."
Far from the troubled testimonies of photojournalism, Rasha Kahil freezes her everyday. With her own style, her own ambitions and aims, she casts a singular look on the world that surrounds her. Her first solo show in Beirut is entitled "The Shameless". On the invitation card, this word, which can be said to mean "indecent" or "impudent", is inscribed in red capital letters, like a stamp of censorship.
Why Shameless then? "To break the barriers that we impose on ourselves, says the artist. For a fleeting moment. Letting go." There. It is these moments of abandon – where the social, its rules, its taboos, its what-will-they-say cease to exist – that she seeks to capture. A couple embracing in a giant sauna. A young girl dropping her bra in a public park. A young man getting out of bed stark naked. Another girl relieving her bladder, crouched in a dark alley. And another, completely nude, hiding her face behind a grimace. Alongside this particular image which unveils 'fresh flesh', Kahil has placed on the gallery wall, and in an interesting parallelism, the photograph of hanging animal carcasses.
In Kahil's work, the veil of bashfulness is lifted. Shameless can be therefore be translated to mean "audacity" or "aplomb". Because the artist-photographer dares to show, through the camera lens, that which touches her in desire, in bodies, even in the sexual act itself. She dares to show the final product. She dares. Quite simply. And she endlessly explore the notions of the body and the domestic. Of the domesticated body. And this nudity which repulses or fascinates, shocks or attracts, disturbs or liberates. "I am not trying to shock anyone" she defends herself. Her? She simply immortalizes everyday situations. Makes the private public. And seeks the private in the public. Capturing decisive moments and fixing them forever.
So who is Rasha Kahil then? A thief who keeps on thieving.
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