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+---
+date_start: '05-10-2019 16:27'
+date_end: '11-10-2019 16:27'
+title: 'Nour El Saleh ''Exquisite Farces'''
+media_order: 'Inhabited Props in a Box, 2018.jpeg,Wrong Side of the Table, 2019.jpg'
+show_sidebar: false
+aura:
+    pagetype: website
+---
+
+Exquisite Farces is the culmination of Nour El Saleh’s residency at VO Curations, a
+curatorial and cultural mediation outfit that are helping usher in a new way for artists to
+inhabit and make use of the rapidly transforming architecture of an austere London. It
+also marks her first foray into the wider world following on from three-years of study at
+The Slade School of Fine Art, London.
+El Saleh’s approach dismisses preparatory drawings; lines and forms are imagined,
+physicalised and placed impulsively to prompt new narrative possibilities. She has
+worked towards the creation of a satirical language to communicate an uncanny rendition
+of her own experiences. With her childhood spent in the United Arab Emirates, a host for
+impermanent residents, El Saleh’s comfort was in a constant state of flux, and through the
+work she grapples with a sense of belonging; deceivingly familiar spaces are tensed with
+anguish and actors, and through the use of theatrical and comical imagery, the artist
+reconciles these two forces.
+The Puppeteer of Karakas evokes the memory of a man playing with puppets in the street
+where El Saleh lives in Beirut. Here, the puppeteer is disguised and plays with four
+eccentric real-life marionettes. Any hint that they might fall into a Mickey Sabbath-like
+world of destitution and depravity is reframed with a sense of homeliness; checkered floor
+tiles and floral wallpaper, which feature as a recurrent backdrop across El Saleh’s scenes.
+Inserting small characters in the eyes and heads of certain protagonists, El Saleh seems
+to play with the apparent roles, and who in fact conducts the scene. A mise en abyme
+occurs, the Puppeteer of Karakas becomes puppeteered, and equally, the motherly figure
+of Wrong Side of The Table loses her intimidating aura, turning into a vessel, a further
+prop in the theatre of El Saleh’s mind. Wrong Side of the Table depicts a juxtaposition
+between a naked bust-figure, sitting at the table provocatively, acting out for the sake of
+being rewarded with attention, which is at odds with a heavily cloaked figure under the
+table, an elderly child, hidden out of view, coaxing attention through her aloofness.
+El Saleh’s characters all seem to resemble each other with similar features: prominent
+noses, dimpled chins and brown hair, almost to the point of appearing cloned in certain
+scenes. All interacting intensely within a domestic interior and little space to roam,
+pronounce the collectivistic atmosphere present across the artist’s paintings. This is
+echoed by the two hybrid characters that sit aside the central figure in Inhabited Props in
+a Box, which although are bickering, at once recall squabbling siblings rather than
+anything untoward; and in this lay the charm of El Saleh’s world. Despite the peculiarity of
+her depictions, on further inspection there lies a familiarity and intimate feeling of the
+‘known’. Representation dissolves, El Saleh seems to abolish the stage, the auditorium
+and have spectators sit within the composition. In an Artaud-esque manner, actors are
+seen to be passive and neutral, while masks, puppets and sock marionnettes rule the set.