A Damaged Painting, A Shard of Glass: Discovering Saloua Raouda Choucair

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie surveys the work of Saloua Raouda Choucair in relation to its many contexts, from the experience of Lebanon’s civil war to the lineage of Islamic art and the history of Western modernism. Saloua Raouda Choucair’s studio is stacked to the ceiling with sculptures made of clay, wood, fibreglass, aluminium, brass, plastic, perspex and stone. The many three-dimensional typologies and sustained evocations of movement that she has developed since the 1940s — in bodies of works she has titled ‘trajectories’, ‘interforms’, ‘poems’, ‘odes’, ‘infinite structures’, ‘modules’, ‘sparkles’ and ‘duals’ — are all in abundance here, with examples ranging from pristinely conserved to crumbling, all jostling for space on a spread of purpose-built shelves and cabinets.