Katya Traboulsi

Born in 1960, Katya Traboulsi is a Beirut based multimedia artist whose practice is characterised by the emotional intensity with which she confronts the effects of the Lebanese civil war. Both her paintings and sculptural works are characterised by her bold use of colour, which disrupts the viewer’s expectations of the dark subject matter they are confronted with. Her solo exhibition Perpetual Identities (2018) held at the Salah Barakat Gallery saw presented 46 hand-crafted replicas of Lebanese war bomb shells adorned with colourful patterns, beads and sculpted forms, thus transforming these destructive military objects into beautiful, ornate vessels. In 2013, Traboulsi published Generation War, a body of work that traces the story of photojournalists who witnessed the civil war during the 80s – an homage to their efforts and a political project that seeks to record the country’s complex histories. Traboulsi lived and worked in Dubai from 1989 till 2016 before retuning to her native Beirut. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 1986 in Paris, London, Dubai, Kuwait, North America, the Algerian museum of Modern Art and the International Armory Show in NYC.