Maureen Paley - Youssef Nabil - Eileen Cooper OBE RA - James Watt CVO- Tom Fletcher CMG - Saleh Barakat-Sama Alshaibi-Myriam Boulos - Rania Matar - Zehra Doğan and Elettra Stamboulis - Dominic Chambers -Touria El Glaoui -Ali Cherri -Afifa Aleiby - Laure d’Hauteville and Joanna Chevalier-Larry Amponsah - Victor Ekpuk - Mohammed Omer Khalil - eL Seed - Ahmed Morsi - Aaron Cezar - Ashekman - Michael Landy Part I & II - Sarah Hermez - Natalie Gibson MBE - Helen Storey MBE - The Voice of a Generation Fashion Print Class 2018 Central St Martins - Art Dubai: Myrna Ayad Director and Shumon Basar - Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi - V&A: Kate Bailey - SHOWstudio: Emily Knight and Bex Cassie - Dr. Anthony Brandt - Hassan Hajjaj -Yannis Munro - Dr Benjamin Dix - Michaela Crimmin - Fiona Hawthorne - Hrair Sarkissian- Walid Ardhaoui - Rabih Kayrouz - Hayle Melim Gadelha - Charles Tripp -
Laure d'Hauteville lives and works in Paris as an artistic consultant who works with collectors, galleries and artists. Formerly a cultural journalist, she has been active on the art scene since 1991, working between France and the Middle East. Fueled by her passion for the arts of these regions, her career has been devoted to the promotion of intercultural dialogue between the Middle East and the West.
In 1998, she founded Artuel in Beirut, the first international modern and contemporary art fair in the region, which she directed and curated until 2005. During that period, she also created JABAL, a fair dedicated to the discovery and recognition of young emerging artists in Lebanon. In 2007 and 2008, she established the Artparis-Abu Dhabi Fair (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates). In 2010, she created and directed the Beirut Art Fair, followed by the Singapore Art Fair in 2014. From 2012 to 2018, she launched the Byblos Bank Award for Photography in Lebanon, which helped many photographers gain recognition on the international scene.
In 2021, she conceived and developed the MENART FAIR in Paris, the first fair dedicated to galleries presenting artists from the Middle East and North Africa (ME.NA), which she then succeeded in expanding to other European capitals.
D'Hauteville curated an exhibition at the abbey of Jumièges in July 2022 in collaboration with the Département de la Seine Maritime that did bring together sixteen photographers from the contemporary art scene in Lebanon.
Joanna Chevalier is an artistic director and advisor specialising in contemporary art from the Middle East. Born in Lebanon, she lives and works in Paris, France. She graduated in Political Science at the American University of Paris and founded TalentsVideo, an art film production and distribution company in 2005. In 2010, she produced and delivered ten films linking art and classical music, which were projected during the Nuit Blanche at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. The same year, she curated the exhibition "Who are you Peter?" at the Espace culturel Louis Vuitton. In the following years, she curated several exhibitions, including "Heartland" at the Beirut Exhibition Center, "Forms and Patterns" in collaboration with the Beirut Design Fair at the Maison Rabih Kayrouz and "La Valise d'Orphée" at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. She has also curated several exhibitions in auction houses, including "Michel Deverne" organised by Piasa Beirut ; "Pierre Malbec & Furniture and Art Objects" at Artcurial Beirut. And "From Beirut Art+Design Scene" at Piasa Paris. In 2019, she became the artistic director of the Beirut Art Fair, followed in 2021 by the Menart Fair, a position she still holds today.
At the same time, she founded CMS COLLECTION with Hervé Mikaeloff and François Sarkozy, which is both a joint collection and a tool to support the artists featured in it in their artistic development.
Geoffrey Batchen is the Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His writing about art and photography has featured in numerous journals, books and exhibition catalogues and been translated into 21 languages. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997, and in Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Slovenian, Chinese, Italian and Ukrainian); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001, and in Chinese); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (2008, and in French); What of Shoes?: Van Gogh and Art History (2009, in German and English); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010, in Japanese and English); Repetition och Skillnad (in Swedish, 2011); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016); Obraz a diseminace (in Czech, 2016); More Wild Ideas (in Chinese, 2017); Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018) and Negative/Positive: A History of Photography (2021). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012 + Turkish). His curated exhibitions have been shown at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne; the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoka, Japan; the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik; the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington; and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, NZ.
Born and raised in Ukraine, Katya Grokhovsky is a New York-based artist and educator. Grokhovsky received an M.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a B.F.A from Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Australia and a B.A (Honors) in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. Grokhovsky’s work has been supported through numerous residencies including The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) Studio Program, Sculpture Space, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NYC STAR Residency, SVA MFA Art Practice AIR, Pratt Fine Arts Department AIR, The Museum of Arts and Design Studio Program, BRICworkspace Residency, Ox-BOW School of Art Residency, Wassaic Artist Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts AIR, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellowship AIR, Studios at MASS MoCA, NARS Residency Fellowship, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Watermill Center, and more. She has been awarded the New American Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship, ArtSlant 2017 Prize, Asylum Arts Grant, Australian Council for the Arts Grant, and Freedman Traveling Scholarship for Emerging Artists, among others. Past exhibitions and performances include Smack Mellon, BRIC Biennial, FLUX factory, EFA Project Space, Equity gallery, Queens Museum, MAD Museum and more. Grokhovsky is a Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial (est.2019).
Youssef Nabil began his career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his subjects acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. The past decade also testifies to the artist’s foray into the medium of film; with "You Never Left", 2010, "I Saved My Belly Dancer", 2015, "Arabian Happy Ending", 2016, and "The Beautiful Voyage", 2021.Youssef Nabil’s International solo and group exhibitions include the Studio Museum in Harlem and Aperture Foundation in New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in Canada, at the Aga Khan Museum of Art in Toronto ; in France, at the Centre Pompidou, Maison Rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Institut du Monde Arabe and Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, amongst many other places. Youssef Nabil had his first retrospective exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, titled Once Upon A Dream. His work is part of various international collections, among which: in the USA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Pérez Art Museum in Miami (PAMM), the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art (SCAD) in Savannah; in France, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Collection François Pinault, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris; in Qatar, the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha; in the United Arab Emirates, the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi; in the UK, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; amongst many others.
Interview as part of Art Breath x MENART FAIR