Hiba Kalache

Hiba Kalache (b. 1972) lives and works between San Francisco, CA and Beirut, Lebanon. Within her multidisciplinary practice encompassing drawing, painting and sculptural installation, Kalache addresses the geopolitics of the middle east from the perspective of a female body. On four separate occasions throughout the course of her life, Kalache has left her family home in Beirut behind. Uprooted from her heritage, the abstract idea of translation has been a literal fact of her daily existence and a recurring theme in her work. Her canvases, layered with soft washes of acrylic ink and passionate, intuitive bursts of color, are rooted in a sense of landscape, but the artist’s fragmented and instinctive gestures recall the splintering of memories over the passage of time, leaving traces of emotion untethered to concrete imagery or place. The resulting works, surreal and imagined, exist outside of time and place, referencing the abjectness of the physical body and its experiences.