As part of its Francophonie festival, the Singapore Alliance Française is showing the work of four Middle Eastern photographers who have lived or worked in France.The exhibition, presented in partnership with Sana Gallery, is entitled “Metamorphoses in the Lens of Middle-Eastern Artists” and showcases photographs by Laura Boushnak, Nayla Kai Saroufim, Marcel Rached, and Jack Dabaghian.Although they each produce very different work, the four were chosen by the Alliance Française and Sana Gallery for exemplifying the aim of the festival: to promote “a culture that is plural, aware of, and adapting to its environment, and that calls on universal values even if geographically embedded in different countries around the world,” according to a statement from the two institutions.Of the photographers, the one whose images are perhaps most explicitly about adaptation and plural cultures is photojournalist Jack Dabaghian. His work, which has appeared in Newsweek, Time, and the International Herald Tribune, centers on a long-term project — summed up by Dabaghian as “documenting tribes facing globalization” — for which he produces portraits of people contending with our ever-shrinking world.Working for the Associated Press in Lebanon and covering war zones in Iraq and Israel for the Agence France-Presse, Laura Boushnak has focused on those whose lives have been violently uprooted. More recently, however, she’s turned to a documentary project exploring the difficulty Arab women have in accessing education and literacy programs.Marcel Rached also has extensive experience in combat zones. From 2008 to 2015, he documented the effects of Middle Eastern conflicts, looking at the psychological and physical impact they had on the people of Lebanon.Though she is also Lebanese, Nayla Kai Saroufim’s work could not be more different than that of her compatriot. Combining photography with illustration, she turns street-scene snapshots into colorful worlds of her own creation, making work that blurs the line between photography and graphic design with its cartoon figures. Her work serves as an antidote to the images of conflict presented in this exhibition and that often come to mind when one is asked about “the Middle East.”“Metamorphoses in the Lens of Middle-Eastern Artists” runs through April 24 at Alliance Française de Singapour.
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