Lynn Kodeih. Effacer voir ou le jour où j’ai arrêté de dessiner

Galerie de l’UQAM presents Effacer voir ou le jour où j’ai arrêté de dessiner, an exhibition of Lynn Kodeih, who is completing a master’s degree in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Excavating the relationship to place through formal and plastic experiments, the artist develops protocols of erasure so as to reveal the materiality of the image.

The exhibition

In Effacer voir ou le jour où j’ai arrêté de dessiner, Kodeih investigates the themes of belonging, territoriality, and borders. Through the image and its disappearance, she attempts to materialize the fluctuation between several places: places of origin, affiliation, loss, and colonization. Kodeih reflects on how to position oneself as an immigrant, in a country haunted by its colonial history, in relation to space (that which has been taken from us and that which is offered to us). What can one bring into this new habitat and what should one leave behind? What delimits a territory, rendering it sterile, hostile, or welcoming?

The exhibition presents a body of work that combines video, textuality, and materiality. An almost invisible sound work of fragments oscillates between autotheory and poetry. Through experiments in video and textile printing, Kodeih develops protocols for multiplying and superimposing the image, which becomes saturated almost to the point of disappearing. For the exhibition, the artist takes up the medium of ceramics for the first time to explore the materiality of the trace by marking and shaping. The works show her desire to erase the landscape in order to make other things appear. In the context of a world submerged in images, Kodeih’s work speaks of the need to turn the gaze back to these spaces of loss and allow them to be reimagined.

About the Artist

Lynn Kodeih was born in Beirut and has lived in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal since 2020. Her work focuses on the politics of the image and explores notions of space, borders, itinerancy, and belonging in a colonial and postcolonial world. Her art practice interweaves autotheory, video, and installation. Kodeih has a bachelor’s degree in literary studies and a DES and master’s degree in theatre and performance (Beirut, Lebanon). Her work has been presented in several international group exhibitions, including at the Kunstbanken Performance Festival (Norway), the Rotterdam Film Festival (Netherlands), Transart Triennial (Berlin, Germany), as well as Home Works – Ashkal Alwan, Beirut Art Center, and Beirut Art Fair (Lebanon).

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