For Unseen 2022 Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a duo exhibition by Marwan Bassiouni (CH, 1985) and Lennart Lahuis (NL, 1986).
Coinciding with his participation in the prestigious FOAM Talent 2022 exhibition, Marwan Bassiouni is premiering works from his series of ‘New Swiss Views’ and ‘New British Views’. This extension to his acclaimed ‘New Dutch Views’, marks the transformation of Bassiouni’s project into a ‘New Western Views’ series.
Since 2018 Marwan Bassiouni has been visiting various mosques in the Netherlands in order to photograph the Dutch landscape from the windows of these Muslim places of worship. In the photos you see interiors, combined with the actual view that can be seen from the mosque. The series New Dutch Views (2018-2019) has received international acclaim.
Last year Bassiouni traveled once more to villages, inner cities and suburbs in search of additional New Dutch Views. Together with photographs he made in 2021 in the UK and his native Switzerland, these images form the start of his series ‘New Western Views’. Works from this series will be included in upcoming group shows at Z33 in Hasselt, H3h Biënnal in Oosterhout and Kunsthaus Zürich.
Lennart Lahuis uses photographic reproductions, but makes the image misty by covering the glass plate of the frame with paper and wax. The shrouding of the image disconcerts the viewer; is the image painted or is it a photo? Lahuis plays with the materiality of visual information. Obscuring the composition causes it to almost dissolve into an immaterial blur. By veiling them he underscores the interchangeability of images in our present-day ‘information age’.
The triptych ‘Le Sentiment National’ takes a largely unknown text by artist Kurt Schwitters as its point of departure. The first part of the text seems to be an attempt to reflect on the concept of nationalism. Slowly the text starts to shift until at the end he unexpectedly confounds the very definition of it in a typically dadaist way by suggesting nothing less than a ‘shared sentiment of nationalism’, or a form of ‘global nationalism’. This process of blurring the notion of nationalism is mirrored by the technique that is applied by Lahuis to reproduce Schwitters’ text.
In 2021 Lahuis won the FPT Sustainable Art Award at Artissima in Turin. Next year he will have an extensive solo exhibition at Museum Schloss Moyland in Germany.
