In 1985, Andrée Sfeir-Semler opened a small gallery bearing her name in the northern German city of Kiel. A Lebanese immigrant who had fled her country’s 15-year-long civil war, Sfeir-Semler wanted to make her way in the European art world.
Some 20 years later, during a visit to her home country as it was still healing from that war, she opened a second gallery among the bombed-out ruins of Beirut, Lebanon, the city of her birth, and began to embrace art and artists from the Arab world, having previously focused mostly on European artists.
Now, Sfeir-Semler seems to be everywhere all at once. Her galleries will be a major presence at Art Basel this week, and, later this summer, exhibitions are planned at each location to mark their 40th and 20th anniversaries. Both venues will host a version of “The Shade,” a show with works from 20 artists to honor the Beirut gallery, which has persisted even as Lebanon has fended off continued attacks from neighboring countries, dealt with an economic crisis and survived the Beirut port explosion in 2020. (“The Shade” begins Aug. 21 in Beirut and Sept. 4 in the German branch of the gallery; both iterations are currently scheduled to run until the end of the year.)
Sfeir-Semler, 71, left Beirut with her family and immigrated to Germany in 1975. She studied at the University of Munich, the Sorbonne in Paris and Bielefeld University in Germany, where she earned her Ph.D., before opening her gallery in Kiel, with a focus on European artists. In 1998, she moved that gallery to Hamburg, continuing to work primarily with European artists. Her shift to representing mostly Arab artists came around the time that she opened the gallery’s Beirut branch.
This week at Art Basel, Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s main booth will feature nine established and emerging artists from the Arab world, in what she described in a video interview as a “dialogue between established voices and younger artists from my roster.” Also this week at the fair, two artists that the gallery represents, Walid Raad and Alia Farid, will be featured in the Unlimited sector, a portion of the fair devoted to large-scale work.
“I started the gallery in the middle of nowhere in northern Germany, and I thought, No one knows me, so I need to start with important people, such as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Sol LeWitt,” she recalled. “It’s only actually around the end of the 1990s that I encountered the work of Walid Raad at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin and then began championing Arab artists. If you look back at the Arab world in 2003 and today, the landscape has completely shifted. The change has been exponential.”
Her transition to becoming a gallerist devoted strictly to Arab artists came as the Lebanese civil war began to wane in the 1990s. An instinct that Lebanon was a place to discover and nurture talent led her to various artists. On a trip to Beirut in 2004, she visited Bernard Khoury, the architect who designed the B018 underground nightclub, built like a bunker in an area that had been home to refugees in the 1970s. The capital city was alive with nightlife and young people yearning to reclaim the country, despite car bombings that rocked the streets that year and in 2005.
“I wondered if I should proceed, but I decided to, and we counted 1,800 visitors to our opening in Beirut,” she recalled. “That’s when I started building a new identity and a new program.”
Vincenzo de Bellis, chief artistic officer and global director of Art Basel fairs, acknowledges Sfeir-Semler’s place in the global art market.
“Andrée’s story speaks for itself,” de Bellis said in a recent video interview. “She’s been a driving force for Arab artists, putting many of them, across generations, on the map and in conversation with artists around the world.”
De Bellis said that the announcement last month of Art Basel Qatar was a testament to the changes — and visibility — of the Middle Eastern art market in the decades since Sfeir-Semler began her galleries. He said that the new artistic director of Art Basel Qatar would be announced shortly after Art Basel and that it would be someone from the region.
Among the most celebrated artists whom Sfeir-Semler represents is Raad, who grew up in Lebanon but now lives in New York. Raad’s installation at Art Basel Unlimited, “Sweet Talk Commissions (Solidere: 1994–1997)” — which he said in a text message was about “Beirut seducing its inhabitants into inventing new ways to live given that their security is not guaranteed by the state or any militia” — will project on three walls videos of building implosions in Beirut. The videos, on a 10-minute loop, show buildings collapsing and rising again as the film is shown in reverse. It is the latest in his “Sweet Talk” series that began with photographs in 1987 during the height of the country’s civil war and evolved into video in 2019, Raad said.
“You can’t tell if the buildings are going down because of a missile, an airstrike, a natural disaster or a controlled implosion,” Raad, 58, said in a recent phone interview. “They’re in constant motion.”
Raad sees more than just the simple and destructive force behind that motion. He said that it was about experiencing and documenting history.
“I tend to think a lot about what a ruin is, and I often think about the physical condition of a building and if certain buildings get stuck in a certain place and time,” Raad explained. “It can be ancient or a newer building that suffered from war. You patch it up or destroy it and then it’s not a ruin. Or is it?”
Much of his artwork reflects his years of living through Lebanon’s civil war and how buildings became unsafe because neighbors could be your enemies, he said.
“If you lived in a city like Beirut that is constantly under siege with a car bomb almost every day for 17 years, you have to know if your neighbor has a daughter or son and if they’re dating someone and who that person is,” he said. “All the walls between apartments become invisible. Walls disappear.”
Farid, another of the gallery’s artists, will present a new chapter of her ongoing project “Elsewhere,” also in the Unlimited sector. Farid, who is Kuwaiti and Puerto Rican, began the project in 2013 with hand-woven tapestries mapping the Arab and South Asian diaspora. The new chapter of the project, with 18 tapestries focused on Cuba, portrays the country with color-splashed shop fronts, mosques, scenes of nature and inscriptions in a hodgepodge of culture and city life.
“There’s an idea in the Caribbean that it is a place of social and racial confluence of Indigenous and people from Spain and Africa, but there are all these other migrations from China, India and the Arab world,” Farid, 39, explained in a phone interview. “I was noticing architecture from the Middle East in the Caribbean, and I found it interesting how these architectural forms arrived.”
Farid is also a filmmaker and was on a trip from her home in Kuwait to southern Iraq in 2022 when she found a cooperative of weavers there. She said that she now employed about 80 of them part time to help with her work. This adds to the multicultural element of her approach, she said.
“They have a tradition of doing flat weaving for blankets or floor pieces, and they do chain stitching to expand the life span of the tapestry and as a form of embellishment,” Farid explained. “It’s just a way of thinking about the back and forth, how elements migrate and how they migrate back and how they get interpreted.”
For Sfeir-Semler, this year’s Art Basel is about celebrating her journey but also that of the artists and the world of Arab art as a whole, no matter where that celebration is taking place.
“I exhibited Walid Raad in my Hamburg gallery starting in 2004 and then started researching and traveling the Arab world and looking at talent I could support,” she said. “It was something in my DNA. It is what you would in German call heimat, which is not about your home country. It’s something else. It’s the place you feel for despite how long you’ve lived somewhere else.”
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