On the occasion of the night of contemporary arts 2017, Gagliardi e Domke gallery presents two projects, “Smell me, Touch me, Kiss me” and “Hayat”, by the young artist Christine Kettaneh from Lebanon.

Christine Kettaneh
won the Aomi Okabe Jury award in Art Olympia in Tokyo (Jun17); she also won the overall Arte Laguna Prize for the ‘Sculpture and Installation category’ and the special ‘artist in gallery’ prize in Venice (Mar’15).
“Despite our advanced forebrains, we remain ignorant at a macro scale. We are, like ants, only conscious of our micro decisions – to build this or that, to move here or there – and their very immediate effects on our lives. Yet those same conscious decisions contribute to a longer term global behaviour like that of an ant colony, an ‘emergent’ intelligence, that we have no way of immediately perceiving.
Our reality at any point resides in our cultural artefacts and in the debris of history, the products of a complex macro course; but we can only experience reality and interact with it at a local, micro level. That is why, when we observe more closely life at home and on the street, we feel a sense of alienation – because of that mismatch in scale between what we encounter and how we interact with it. We also feel alienated because there is no clear correspondence between what we know and what we perceive. Our reality is a product of more than the known history, so our knowledge always falls short. To define an object, a person, or a system by its history would only limit it. We might need to trust our immediate experience of it, our very gnawing sense of alienation, to attempt a more complete understanding.
In my work, there is always an intrigue in the everyday matter. In the next two projects, I explore the bar of soap on my wash basin, the ants in my garden, the sugar on my kitchen table, and the language in my mouth. My search, as always, involves an enquiry into language. There is a temporary forgetting of meaning when I feed the ants with the alphabet and when I suspend my research on the origin of Hayat, the soap. Only to pick up the words again and use them as triggers for rituals in the hopes of smelling, touching and kissing matter’s more metaphorical possibilities.

Smell me, Touch me, Kiss me
My dad had grown a beautiful garden but left just before the trees bore their first fruit. After his 10th memorial I went into the garden in search of him. Over two months I prepared and served sugar letters to the garden. The ants responded. When an ant stumbled across a letter it marked a scented trail on the way back to the nest so that more ants might follow. When an ant encountered another ant, it felt the other ant with its antennae; they then kissed as they recited scented liquid letters to each other. Through that emergent intelligence, the ants self-organized and carried the meaning point by point, transforming the underground into a mine of smells, touches and kisses.

Hayat
‘Hayat,’was my response to an old advertisement from the 1950s of a ‘saboon baladi’ (traditional Lebanese soap) called Hayat. In the ad, was a hand holding the soap up with the tips of its fingers very elegantly and lightly, so unlike how one would carry a rough brick-like ‘saboon baladi’. I wondered whether it had been the name Hayat, which means life in Arabic, whichhad allowed that divergence. I explored possible ways of carrying hayat, proving along the way that there was language in life, and life in language.”