Rayyane Tabet: Encounters

Curated by Ziba Ardalan, “Encounters” is the first major solo exhibition in the United Kingdom dedicated to Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet.
With works from the past 13 years, the show presents fleeting moments in time and place, alternative perceptions or paradoxical views of political and personal events through sculpture and found objects.
Centerpieces of the show are Tabet’s pieces “The Sea Hates A Coward” (2015): a pair of wooden oars over 4-metres long suspended from the ceiling that once belonged to a boat that the artist’s father had rented in 1987 during the Lebanese Civil War to row his young family to safety in Cyprus; and “Steel Rings” (2013) comprised of 39 rolled steel rings, each one engraved with a distance in kilometres, a longitude, latitude and the elevation of a specific point along the TAPline pipeline – the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, built in 1947 and once the world’s largest long-distance oil pipeline, is still the only physical structure that crosses the borders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, the Golan, and Lebanon.