DUBAI.- Green Art Gallery announced the opening of Alessandro Balteo-Yazbecks solo exhibition on
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Distilling irony into humor the artist focuses on the human nature behind cyclical historic events. Analyzing the domineering modern Western worldview, he proposes an understanding of contemporary global culture as one more entangled, more decentered and more tongue in cheek.
By inviting us to look at ancient empires using the visual codes of the present, the series "All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset" (2018), suggests that todays networked digital culture gives the world a more uniform look than any historical empire despite its eclectic style.
To refer to our digital ecosystems or Echo Chambers, Balteo-Yazbeck went as further back into history, pointing that the well-known imperialist maxim "All the Lands from Sunrise to Sunset" is actually a classic formulation of the human desire for dominion that can be traced from ancient Persia to Mesopotamia, Egypt and through the Old Testament up to all Europe.
The artist turned the original versions of the imperial maxim into email addresses and hashtags. In all his lettering collages he appropriates street-posters and the visuals of advertisement; like in extravagant ransom notes, the letters pasted against backgrounds of fragmented social medias images from advertising, the news, sleek technologies and even interior design. Other collages, point to continuities between earlier empires and todays Echo Chambers: liberal neoconservative or eco-conservationist subjects wildly circulating thanks to Silicon Valleys pervasive digital ecosystems.
The collage series was commissioned and exhibited at the 2019 Sharjah Biennial. Each collage is a recuperated wall fragment from Balteo-Yazbeck site-specific architectonic intervention in a colonial era venue.