Raouf Rifai: Carnival of Darwiches

Conference by Dina Germanos Besson, Thierry Lamote, and Nassima Neggaz on the work of Lebanese artist Raouf Rifai

29 October 2014, 6.30 pm
Sana Gallery
63 Spottiswoode Park Road, Singapore 088651

Raouf Rifai, Arab Spring Darwich. Courtesy of the Artist.

This conference, presented by the Foundation for Art and Psychoanalysis in partnership with Singapore’s Sana Gallery, discusses and explores the work of Lebanese artist Raouf Rifaï, through psychoanalytic and social perspectives in an unprecedented public conversation.

Throughout his body of work, Rifaï has developed an extensive series of paintings dedicated to the figure of the Darwich, a term which, having a multitude of meanings, comes from the Arabic word for a common man. Across its different iterations in Rafaï’s paintings and drawings, the Darwich is rendered by the artist as fundamentally human, embodying dichotomies that are proper to the human condition: vice and virtue, strength and weakness, farce and tragedy. By employing several, heterogeneous elements at once—at times belonging to Ottoman, Egyptian, and Asian histories—Rafaï discloses the ‘common man’ as being far from simple. Rather, there are undeniable complexities permeating the artist’s figures, without fundamental ambivalences ever being reduced to an artificial synthesis.

Starting from Rafaï’s work, Dr. Dina GermanosBesson, Dr. Thierry Lamote, and Dr. Nassima Neggaz will analyse social structures in Lebanon, focusing on how contemporary bonds are influenced by what is referred to in psychoanalytic theory as the capitalist discourse. This discussion will set the stage for reflections on art, particularly concerning Rafaï’s work, as an agent of resistance to the dissolution of social bonds, while also being able to provide the means for their renewal.

Raouf Rifai, Darwich. Courtesy of the Artist.

Dina Germanos Besson is a psychologist. Besson has earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Toulouse Jean-Jaurés University. She is the author of several articles on topics including religions, culture, and social relations in Lebanon, which were published at the francophone Lebanese newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour.

Thierry Lamote is a researcher associated with the Clinical Research Team at the Laboratoire de Cliniques Psychopathologique et Interculturelle of the Toulouse Jean-Jaurés University. A Doctor in Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology, Lamote is the author of several articles on contemporary forms of social bonds and of the work La scientologie déchiffrée par la psychanalyse, published in 2011 by Presses Universitaires du Mirail.

Nassima Neggaz is a postdoctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. Neggaz received the 2014 prize awarded by the Research Committee (RC) 25 for her article ‘Le printemps arabe de la Syrie: enrichissement du language pendant la révolution’, published in Language, Discourse & Society. Neggaz’s publication studies the evolution of the Arabic language and the way it was impacted by different political events.