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Artwork Description

In her new body of work, Annabel Daou explores themes of ownership and dispossession, permanence and impermanence. The act of cutting away, for the artist, is a means of both revealing and obscuring, as well as an attempt to play with ideas of weight and weightlessness. There is a sense of movement and malleability to these works, which resemble threadbare fabric or fragile tapestries. In the large work on paper, oh darling, darling, thistles, markers of place, replace language, become netlike in their interlacement. For Daou, the globe thistle, native to Lebanon, is a familiar object from her past that has appeared in her work at times of struggle. Daou sees the thistle pieces as landscapes of adversity and enticement. Whereas the grid or blocklike ground is suggestive of building and structure, the fencelike pattern that figures in other works conjures barriers or boundaries. There is the sense that some intuited notion or object lies just out of reach. Annabel Daou’s work takes form through paper-based constructions, sound, performance, and video. Daou suspends, carves out, or records the language of daily life: from the ordinary or mundane to the intimately personal and urgently political. In her performance work she explores questions of trust, intimacy, cross-cultural exchange, and the operations of power. Her work frequently evokes moments of rupture and chaos but with the tenuous possibility for repair. Daou was born and raised in Beirut and lives in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include what is left of us at signs and symbols, New York (2024); War Games at Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2024); DECLARATION at Ulrich Museum of Art (2022) and Global Spotlight: Annabel Daou at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (2022). Her billboard project What is mine? What is yours? was shown in Beirut in 2024 as part of Temporary Art Platform’s In the Blink of an Eye. Recent residencies include the Pollock-Krasner award at ISCP in New York and Haus Des Papiers in Berlin. A monograph of Daou’s work is being published by Distanz in the spring of 2025.