Mazen Kerbaj »One Year«
Exhibition Opening + Solo Performance.
9 February 2017 • 18:30
For the book Un An – Journal d’Une Année Comme les Autres (One Year – Diary of a Year Like the Others), Mazen Kerbaj challenged himself to expose his life in a collection of 382 drawings executed on a cheap diary, day by day, for the whole of 2012, using a variety of mediums (e.g. ink, watercolour, charcoal, etc.). Some of the illustrations are satirical and touching, inspired by his life in Beirut or his travels abroad, while others are simple chromatic ‘games’ of illustrations on the verge of abstraction. When he recounts his life, he is never self-indulgent, and the result is a picture book with a pop philosophy that is not only a self-portrait of Kerbaj, but also an examination of a range of contemporary issues.
At Fylkingen, the 382 drawings will be gathered in one big installation, giving the viewer an opportunity to grab the whole year at the first eye contact with the work, and then to delve into it randomly and create their own flow of reading – and thus their own story.
Mazen Kerbaj's appearance at Second Edition has been made possible with the support of the Goethe Institut, Schweden.
Mazen Kerbaj was born in 1975 in Beirut and is active with comics, painting and music, publishing his first personal graphic works in 2000 and also starting to play publicly that year.
His first concert — at Strike's pub in Beirut — a duo with Lebanese sax player Christine Sehnaoui can possibly be regarded as the first improvised music concert in the Middle East. In 2001, together with guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui ,he created the MILL association that curates IRTIJAL — an annual international festival for free music in Beirut.
Mazen Kerbaj currently lives in Berlin.