‘Adrift’
The Lebanese artist’s solo show in London “explores themes of memory, displacement, and reconstruction through a multidisciplinary practice,” according to a press release. This 2023 work —a Mediterranean fishing boat fitted with Levantine-style windows — “captures the tension of migration, where opportunity for some becomes danger for others,” the curatorial statement says, adding that it “explores heritage, displacement, and the fragile line between safety and peril.”
‘Sorrowful and Bellicose’
Here, Mallat presents a hanging anchor “composed of illegible Arabic text which visually merges the familiar and the strange,” the curatorial statement for the show explains. “A jute rope is adorned by copper dendrites in the shape of coral growths, suggesting a repeated submersion in bodies of water. These nautical references symbolize both physical and metaphorical journeys into the sinking unknown, bringing to the forefront themes of erasure, refuge, wreckage, and the abyss.”
‘Constellations of Protection X’
This bronze sculpture from Mallat’s ongoing series features in a show in which Mallat explores the eponymous philosophical concept, used by Plato to “describe the moment of profound doubt that follows questioning,” and by Aristotle to portray “a necessary obstruction through which knowledge advances,” the press release states. “Mallat’s works resist both nostalgia and repair. They dwell instead in what the artist calls a ‘poetics of aftermath’: an aesthetics of instability that reflects ... the times we live in.”
