Ninar Esber

Based on personal experience –of womanhood but also coming from a certain elevation and slow languor –Ninar Esber’s work touches profoundly upon the notion of identity whilst tracing a poetic vision of the world.  The artist uses the human body as an element to support a collective symbolism, made to work in relation to architecture and everyday objects in order to play on the notion of context, in the social, interpersonal even political sense of the term.  In her photographs, videos and performances, the sensuality which runs through her work questions genres, morality and their authority.  Thus, she makes use of stereotypes in order to better criticize them: the pin-up and the Hollywood star (the performance On the Rooftop of Kom Ghrab in 2008, the series of photographs NMM and also Pin-up) superheros (FEMALE, 2009), cultural symbols (Colours, Arlesienne), etc.

Ninar Esber was born in 1971 in Beirut (Lebanon) and now lives between Paris and Beirut. After training at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy (France) from 1995 to 2000, she has shown her work in Paris (France), Bangkok (Thailand) and also in Reykjavik (Iceland) throughout the 2000s.

She has taken part in exhibitions, such as Crossings between 2008 and 2010 at the Grand Palais in Paris (France), Rabat (Morocco), Cairo (Egypt), Word into Art in 2006 at the British Museum in London (Great Britain).  More recently, she has worked at Darat Al Funun in Jordan.  The artist has enjoyed a number of residences, in 2010 a Nowa Soda, Contemporary Art Center-Solvay in Cracow (Poland) and also in the Villa Medicis Hors-les-Murs programme in New York in 2006.  In 2011, she takes part in the twelfth Istanbul Biennial in Turkey.