Rayyane Tabet

Colosse Aux Pieds D'Argile . 2015

+ Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Colosse Aux Pieds D’Argile a large-scale sculpture composed of marble columns and concrete cylinders transforms the first floor gallery into a field. The columns are reclaimed from a nineteenth century house in Beirut that was clandestinely destroyed by a group of workers to force its reluctant owners to sell it. The cylinders are concrete stress test samples from the skyscraper that was built to replace this house. The work confronts two versions of the same architectural element – the column – acquired from the same site spanning the course of one hundred years of urban development. Both the house and the skyscraper have reflected the ideals of how life should be lived. Both have been extrapolated into ideas of how an environment should be built, un-built or re-built. Each has been used to usher concepts of modernity and each holds within their building blocks the seeds of their own unmaking.
Sfeir-Semler Gallery