Lara Baladi

Lara Baladi (born 1969 in Beirut, Lebanon) is an acclaimed Egyptian-Lebanese photographer, archivist and multimedia artist. She was educated in Paris and London and currently lives in Cairo. Baladi exhibits and publishes worldwide. Her body of work encompasses photography, video, visual montages/collages, installations, architectural constructions, tapestries, sculptures and even perfume.

Work Since 1997, she has been a member of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), for which she directs magazine editorials and curates exhibitions and artist residencies. She curated the artist residency Fenenin el Rehal (Nomadic Artists) in Egypt's White Desert in 2006 and participated in workshops and conferences around the world. Baladi is represented by the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo and Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde (IVDE Gallery) in Dubai. Baladi received a Japan Foundation Fellowship in 2003 to research manga and anime in Tokyo. Among other global locations, she participated in the VASL residency program in Karachi, Pakistan in 2010. The breadth and variety of Baladi’s international experience influences her use of iconography drawn from numerous cultures.

Photo-montage In 2000, she participated in The Desert, a group exhibition at Fondation Cartier in Paris with Om El Dounia (Mother of the World), a vast mosaic of photographs with highly saturated colors. This piece, while playful and with many references to pop culture, is also an exploration of the Biblical story of creation.

In 2007, Baladi presented a work called Justice for the Mother, which depicts leaders of Arab countries. She considers it part of a series she calls "anthropological photography," where she assembles series of photographs that tell a larger story.

Sandouk el Dounia (The World in a Box), is a huge composition of hundreds of scanned photographs. The name of the piece references traditional street theater for children in Cairo.

Installations An enormous installation titled "Al Fanous el Sehryn" (the Magic Lantern) was shown at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo in 2003. The work consists of "a large eight-pointed star constructed of steel--approximately 23 feet in diameter--and a series of light boxes containing saturated colored images produced from x-ray photographs of a pregnant doll giving birth". The art suggests a cyclical nature where the images of the doll endlessly grow up and then giving birth over and over. The star shape was inspired by the chandeliers which hang in the mosque of Mohammed Ali in the Cairo Citadel. was presented in 2006 at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and in 2009 at Arabesques, an exhibition of Arab contemporary art at the Kennedy Center in Washington and described as a "human-scale kaleidoscope", that "incorporated images from pop culture, then shattered them in constantly changing geometries",

Coffee cups, presented in 2010 at Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde in Dubai has been considered both "playful" and inviting the viewer "into a world of contemplation and reflection".

Tahrir During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Baladi co-founded two media initiatives: Radio Tahrir and Tahrir Cinema.

Tahrir Cinema went live on July 14, 2011. Lara Baladi created a collection of footage that included videos shot by activists directly involved in the revolution. Baladi writes, "people in the square took photos because they felt the social responsibility to do so...The camera became a nonviolent weapon aimed directly at the state, denouncing it." Vox Populi is a multimedia documentary that consists of an archive of articles, images and videos that Baladi had been gathering since January 25, 2011. Preserving the ephemera and the images of the revolution in Tahrir is important to Baladi. She writes that "most of the images of the 18 days [of protest] vanishing into a bottomless pit thanks to Google's PageRank algorithm, will the vision of a possible new world people glimpsed in [Tahrir] Square die along with its digital traces?" This expression of the fleeting nature of the digital world informs her current work.

Selected solo exhibitions 2015 Perspectives, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC, USA

2011 Hope, NY Abu Dhabi University Gallery, New York City, NY, USA

2010 Diary of the Future, Gallery Isabelle Van Den Eynde, Dubai, UAE

2008 Surface of Time, B21 Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE

2006 Towards the Light, 20 screen projections along one kilometer of the seashore on opening night of Image of the Middle

East Festival, Copenhagen International Theatre, Denmark

Roba Vecchia, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, Egypt

2004-6 Kai’ro Lansmuseet, Vasternorrland, Harnosand, Sweden, 2005-6 Nikolai, Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, Denmark, 2005 Pori Museum, Pori, Finland, 2005

Bilmuseet, Umea, Sweden, 2004

2002 Al Fanous Al Sehry, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, Egypt

2001 Sandouk Al Dounia

El Nitaq Festival, Cairo, Egypt Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon