QUEENDOM

LOHAUS SOMINSKY is honored to present Ilit Azoulay's latest exhibition, QUEENDOM, after its debut at the 59th Venice Biennale.

QUEENDOM is a world imagined by Azoulay, where art reigns supreme, empowering images to break free, demand attention and explore their own sovereignty. The exhibition challenges our perception of ownership and cultural appropriation and opens pathways into an imagined non-patriarchal, trans-regional, interconnected Middle East, where fluid identities, ambivalences, and complexities are celebrated.

QUEENDOM emerges as a result of a system crash, flooding out of the digital realm and spilling into our reality.
The large-scale panoramic photomontages presented in the exhibition are a symphony of fracture and healing, while the audio work fills the space with a universal language, creating a rhizomatic, research-based fiction where stories and histories merge.

The exhibition draws on the almost forgotten photo and document archive of David Storm Rice (1913-1962), a researcher of medieval metal vessels, and incorporates the precious objects that were manufactured in the Middle East, traded in the Levant, brought to Europe via Venice, and now mostly displayed in western museums. Through digital craftwork, Azoulay disassembles objects photographed by Rice, then digitally "soldiers" and "inlays" them anew on metal panels, transfiguring their gender in the process. The resulting cartographies display voids, displacements, and replacements in the geographies of knowledge.

We invite you to explore QUEENDOM, a thought-provoking exhibition that blurs the boundaries between the real and the imagined and challenges us to reconsider our relationship with art, history, and identity.

Artworks