Christine Kettaneh

Born in 1982, Christine Kettaneh is a Lebanese artist based in Beirut. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Central Martins College of Art and Design and an MSc in Finance and Economics from London School of Economics. While pursuing her practice as an artist, Kettaneh has been teaching at different universities in Lebanon and London.

Her work has been showcased in individual and collective exhibitions: She held solo exhibitions at Galerie Janine Rubeiz in Beirut (2017) and at Gagliardi e Domke in Turin (2017). In 2016, she had a duo show with Monika Grabuschnigg at Carbon12 in Dubai. Her work was shown as part of many collective exhibitions in different countries. Most recently, her film was screened as part of the exhibition Cassata Drone Expanded Archive in MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2018).

Kettaneh has received several awards for her work: ‘Best Experimental Short Film’ award for her artist film ‘Feelers’ in the Mediterranean Film Festival Cannes (Nov’18); the overall Arte Laguna Prize in the 'Sculpture and Installation category' and the special 'artist in gallery' prize, Venice (Mar'15); the YICCA - art residency in Italy - prize (May’18); the Premio Ora Prize (May’17); and the Aomi Okabe Jury award in Art Olympia, Tokyo (Jun’17). She was also recently longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in York, UK and featured in the Aesthetica Art Prize Anthology 2018.

Kettaneh is represented by Galerie Janine Rubeiz in Beirut where her work is permanently available.

About her work

Fully embedded in conceptualism, researching architecturally minimal works that dissolve as they are being showcased, Christine Kettaneh's research begins with a question about the value and role of the text in contemporary art. While there's always a poetic element involved, what Kettaneh is questioning is not meaning and interpretation but language as a symbolic order, leading towards chaos and entropy; economic models, analytical languages, repetition.

In a 'Coin - A Gift for Wealth', Kettaneh produces a work charged with semantic possibilities How can the meaning of histories and concepts change The artist articulates the need to transgress the limits set up by the grammar of conflict and emerge with new points of departure and destination, challenging the normative view of history as the product of linguistic frames, trajectories and contingencies.