For his solo exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, the Lebanese artist pursues this research, this time through an introspective approach that delves into his personal history.
Soft Skills provides a “return to the homeland”, the Bekaa region of Lebanon, focusing on his childhood, a temporal and spatial fabric of often narrow, normative masculinity. As an adult, he now embodies a future that the child he once was struggled to envision, looking back on a past mingling blissful nostalgia and a solemnity tinged with humour.
As he reviews his family's figures, archives, and trinkets, recalling the mythical or monstrous characters who still inhabit his imagination, the artist re-examines his queer boy desires, an impossible embodiment of the norms of heterosexual masculinity or the homo-eroticism of camaraderie. This queer (re)reading of “soft skills” is a jubilant reinvention of new ways of behaving and being in different contexts.