Natalie Hamada
10.3 – 2.4.2023
Avajaiset/Vernissage 9.3  18:00 – 20:00

Myymälä2 is pleased to present the exhibition “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” by Natalie Hamada. The title of the exhibition originates from the title of a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson. In that vein, for the artist, the word ‘Truth’ gains more agency than it would normally. The truth might come delivered as a series of interlocked visual memories that she cannot be sure if they are real, artificial or just a slanted need for daydreaming to cope with loneliness and isolation during the pandemic, and longing for a sounding peace that faded in her homeland.

Hamada’s remarkable and vividly rich colourful prints are the result of her outstanding and skilful experimentation to extract from printmaking techniques its unique visual and fertile qualities. She can be described as a gifted colourist who knows exactly how to lighten the mood of those almost theatrically staged prints. With silkscreen as the base, she applies several transparent layers of hand-printing, and through dexterous mixing, combining, wiping, stencilling, and obscuring, therefore the unpredictability nature of hand-printing becomes essential in the creative process.

In Hamada’s tableaux, everything and everyone simply exists as an endless recollection of literal and allegorical personal experiences. She juxtaposes imagery from contrasting realities into one image, She merges images sourced from art history, vintage photos, and family albums. In the end, Hamada’s themes all together seem to be a unique exhilaration and self-reflection that result from importing diverse visual sources from the world into the realm of her prints– and those prints turn out a kind of marvellous constructed enchantment–  we can say they express a magnificent splendour on its own terms and strictly for our delight.

Natalie Hamada (Syria, 1994) is a Helsinki-based artist who works mainly with collage and printmaking techniques. She holds an MFA in  Printmaking, from Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts, (2022). She completed her BA in (2015) and MFA (2019) at the Department of Printmaking, Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University, Syria. Recent exhibitions include: “Enter light”, Vaapan Taiteen Tila, Helsinki (2022);  “Life in Place” Galleria Ratamo, Jyväskylä. (2022);  “Illuminated Tales” Uniarts Exhibition Laboratory Project Room. Helsinki (2021) and “Kuvan Kevät 2021”. Uniarts Exhibition Laboratory, Helsinki (2021).

The exhibition is curated by Ramiro Camelo.
Supported by TAIKE