Hiba Kalache (هیبا کلاکه)

Hiba Kalache is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, sculpture and interactive projects. Kalache draws on her daily life for her materials, process and content. She interrogates the separation between the private and public spheres, and more specifically, what she calls, “the banality of daily rituals”. Her recent interests include female desire and the abject in relation to truth, and the possibility of positing futurity in an era of perpetual presentism. In Our Dreams are a Second Life, Hiba Kalache presents a body of work that extends the themes and gestures of her recent practice. Produced in a period of protracted sociohistorical and existential crises, this work is subtly consonant with the times.

In 2005, Kalache received a Master of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She has since exhibited in Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Istanbul, New Orleans, Oakland, San Jose (USA), San Francisco, Tehran, Athens, London and Paris. Her work has also been shown at art fairs including MENART fair, Art Dubai, Abu Dhabi art fair, Drawing Now (Paris), and Gwangju Art (South Korea). With Kalache’s most recent relocation to California in 2021, she is producing work in relation to this shift.

Kalache’s recent exhibitions include Encounters – ongoing (2020) at The Upper Gallery at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite (2018), a solo exhibition curated by Natasha Gasparian at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Mimesis Expression Construction (2016) curated by Octavian Esanu at the American University of Beirut’s Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Heartland (2015) curated by Joanna Chevalier at the Beirut Exhibition Center, and Under Construction, Exposure (2014) curated by Marie Muracciole at the Beirut Art Center. In 2012, she had solo shows in Beirut with The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, and the FFA Private Bank. In 2017, she taught fine arts at the Lebanese American University.