Fouad Elkoury: The Greatest Day / Saara Ekström: Alchemy / Charles and Ray Eames

Fouad Elkoury: The Greatest Day
In the video installation Les plus beau jour (The Greatest Day), photographer and film-maker Fouad Elkoury couples his own images from various times and geographical locations, with excerpts from the poem “To Be in a Time of War” by the Lebanese author and artist Etel Adnan. A poetic interplay between image and text communicates experiences of a changing existence through parallel stories of war, daily life, love and despair.

In the 1980s, Fouad Elkoury documented the civil war in Lebanon. He subsequently started to question the individual photographic image and now combines several media in order to create new meaning: photography, text, sound and video. Juxtaposing different layers of information evokes the viewer’s associations and new stories are generated.

Fouad Elkoury (b. 1952, Paris) lives and works in Paris and Beirut. He has published a series of photo books, and his images have been exhibited at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Venice Biennale and the Beirut Art Center. Fouad Elkoury was one of the founders of the Arab Image Foundation. This is his first exhibition in Scandinavia.

Saara Ekström: Alchemy
Life and death, blooming and withering, attraction and repulsion challenge each other in Saara Ekström’s provocative aesthetics. In her work, she brings together contrasting phenomena in unexpected, unsettling ways and questions culturally bound notions of what objects and materials symbolise.

Saara Ekström works mainly with photography and video, but also with text, sound and sculptural installations. This exhibition presents a selection of the artist’s latest works and is based on her fascination with alchemical processes. The exhibition title Alchemy refers to the processes in which symbolic values are refined and modified.

Saara Ekström (b. 1965, Finland) has exhibited in the USA, Brazil, Japan and various places in Europe. Her work is held in numerous public collections and she has been nominated for prestigious awards, including the Ars Fennica and the Carnegie Art Award.

Thanks to the Swedish-Finnish Cultural Foundation.

Charles and Ray Eames
Charles and Ray Eames are among the most influential designers of the 20th century. Together they moved fluidly between the fields of photography, film, architecture, exhibition-making, and furniture and product design. The Eames Office in Los Angeles was a hub of activity where they produced pioneering designs with a boundless creativity that defined their careers.

The exhibition includes furniture, products, models and multi-media installations, as well as personal letters, photographs, drawings and artwork. It reveals the breadth of the Eameses’ innovative work, reminds us of their playful ideas and provides an insight into their personal lives.

Charles Eames (1907–78) was born in Missouri and started his career as an architect. Ray Eames (1912-88) was born in California and initially trained as an artist. The exhibition was curated and produced by the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in collaboration with the Eames Office. It has been made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.