Katya Traboulsi is a Lebanese multimedia artist whose practice is characterized by the emotional intensity with which she confronts the effects of the Lebanese civil war. Often in her painting...
Katya Traboulsi is a Lebanese multimedia artist whose practice is characterized by the emotional intensity with which she confronts the effects of the Lebanese civil war. Often in her painting and sculptural works she uses bold color, which disrupts the viewer’s expectations of the dark subject matter they are confronted with. By contrast her bronze, The Voice of the People, is simple and direct. The single, bisected fist is rich with realistic texture and rises boldly from its plinth. The forceful salute, a ubiquitous symbol of people power, represents defiance in the face of oppression and injustice. For Traboulsi, the work was inspired by months of protests in Lebanon against the country’s corrupt governing class, which brought Lebanon to financial collapse. Lebanon’s economic woes were exacerbated by the additional challenge of Covid-19, but for Traboulsi, the sculpture embodies the resilience of the human spirit.
Traboulsi’s work has been exhibited internationally since 1986 in Paris, London, Dubai, Kuwait and North America, and she has participated in exhibitions at the Algerian Museum of Modern Art, the International Armory Show, and the United Nations in New York City. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Tabari Artspace, Dubai (2014 -15) and at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut (2018). Notably, in her exhibition at Saleh Barakat Gallery titled Perpetual Identities, she exhibited 46 handcrafted replicas of Lebanese war bomb shells colorfully adorned with beads, paint, and sculpted forms, which were shown at the MEI Art Gallery in October 2019. Traboulsi lived and worked in Dubai for several decades before returning to her home-city Beirut in 2016.