Cities by the Rivers, an exhibition by Anna Boghiguian presented at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art from October 31st, 2015 to January 16th, 2016.

"The hundred light bulbs are turned off. The traveler takes a last look at the painting of the horseman who built the coffeehouse, the many mirrors, saying goodbye to a time that is here and is no more here. Through the alleys, the traveler starts the journey from the goldsmiths’ shops to the brass sellers to the madrasas and the mosques, the dirt-ridden roads bearing the hoof marks of donkeys, horses, and camels and their dung."

Anna Boghiguian, Anna’s Egypt

"Where am I going? And the answer is I’m going."

Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

Cities by the Rivers is an ongoing project by Anna Boghiguian that traces the artist’s time in Egypt, India, Ethiopia and Brasil and includes new work made while in situ in Montréal. Boghiguian’s drawings, objects, poetry and prose operate both as reflections on the geopolitical conditions in which the people she encounters live, and as documents of the liminal spaces of the cities that she travels through. The rivers that traverse these cities function as geographical frontiers, and as socio-political barriers, to be crossed, or not, both literally and in the imaginary. They are lifelines and thruways that are used and occupied precariously. They are generative spaces, yet vulnerable, perilously turbulent, at times calm. 

“I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I who have barely started my journey, I start it with a sense of tragedy, guessing toward which lost ocean my steps of life are leading.”

Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

A new series of walkers inhabits the gallery. Ambulatory and migratory characters, some conceivably refugees, they seem to cross wide territories and bodies of water, fleeing from the tribulations of war and poverty, tracing old or creating new patterns of displacement and lines of flight across the globe. Boghiguian paints these figures with wax, embedding directly into the characters and landscapes traces of the culture of the bees that produced it, whose system of social organization and behaviour are now also in peril.

This exhibition is part of SBC’s long term Focus Program on Água Viva.

Thanks to Alvéole & OBORO