TAREK HADDAD

As Close As It Gets

à défaut d’y être

a solo exhibition by TAREK HADDAD

Curated by Nicolas Marbeau

Whether through deconstruction or reconstruction, what Tarek Haddad is seeking seems recoverable only through its alteration.

He returns to his images with tireless persistence, manipulating, distorting, and transforming them. Permeating his vision of the world is a life lived in fragments: Lebanon, departures for France and Finland, journeys as much endured as desired, and, ultimately, his return.

From these successive displacements, he extracts a photographic material that becomes something tangible, something that can be grasped and worked. The images themselves become surfaces upon which he intervenes with deliberate precision. First through observation, which gives rise to doubt: what exactly are we looking at? Are these truly landscapes, seas or mountains? Or rather objects through which he reads a distant present? Then comes addition: the ruler that measures the world and lends it form; stones carefully placed upon a photographic print that appears to sink inexorably until object and image become indistinguishable. Finally comes reconfiguration, the ordering of a universe in which sea, cubes, and pixels coexist, where the microscopic assumes monumental scale.

Haddad knows this method is ultimately doomed to fail. Mastery continually slips from his grasp. What he seeks remains beyond reach, while what has been forgotten, what lies far from home, may already have disappeared. His obsession begins to reveal itself everywhere, a kind of perceptual dislocation that he persistently strives to bring into order.

Never entirely at home anywhere, it is perhaps within these images that he comes closest to finding a place of his own. Is this sustained study of landscape an attempt to recover an origin or, conversely, to escape it? These are no longer the studies or topographical records that painters once brought back from working directly from nature. Rather, they are works concerned with memory, in which every element becomes either a recollection to be recovered or a memory still in the process of coming into being.

And the information continues to accumulate: a data center of the landscape where every possible configuration coexists as fragments held in suspension, awaiting recombination.

Originally trained in computer programming, the artist stands in the lineage of the nineteenth-century photographers who were, above all, scientists. His medium is no longer simply light itself, but the way light inscribes a surface; from silver gelatin paper to the digital sensor. The aftershocks left by these photosensitive impressions, like passing digital waves that shift, transform, and gradually dissipate, do not reproduce the world so much as propose another version of it: unstable, fragmented, and perpetually beginning again. As though the image were the only territory to which return remains possible.

Artist Biography

Tarek Haddad is a Lebanese photographer born in Beirut in 1991. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science (2013) and Photography (2017) from Notre Dame University–Louaizé, Lebanon, and a Master’s degree in Photography from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie, Arles, France (2024).

His work is a visual contemplation of how we inhabit and transform our environments, situated at the intersection of the natural realm and the constructed world. His practice often takes form through photographic interventions and installations.

Since leaving Lebanon in 2020, his work has become an incessant search for a familiar landscape in unfamiliar places and an attempt to reconstitute it, with the landscape eventually becoming an instrument for thinking distance and time. Striking a balance between playfulness and control, between the poetic and the pragmatic, his practice recently employs processes of transformation and reconfiguration through which photography becomes both image and object. In doing so, it reflects a recurring interest in what happens when nature becomes mediated, displaced, reconstructed, fragmented, or absorbed into human systems, while inviting memory, imagination, and experience to participate in the production of meaning.

Tarek Haddad was an artist-in-residence with the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Mountain Regions in Bellwald, Switzerland, in 2019, and with the Saradar Foundation in Beirut (2022–2023). His work has been exhibited in Lebanon and across Europe in photography festivals such as PhotoEspaña (2022) and the Bienal Fotografia do Porto (2023), and international fairs such as Paris Photo (2023), Art Düsseldorf (2024), and Photo London (2025). His work is part of the Centre d’art Madeleine-Lambert collection in Vénissieux, France.

Since 2019, he is one half of a duo formed with multidisciplinary artist Laetitia El Hakim. Their practice stems from an ongoing conversation that began that year with questioning the power dynamics at play in Lebanon, in light of the socio-political upheaval, and has since grown to encompass notions of forced separation, and the mapping and quantification of loss while Haddad was living in France.

The duo had its solo exhibition “ebb & flow” at Galerie Tanit, Lebanon, in 2023, and has been part of group exhibitions in Beirut, Ghent, Jumièges, as well as at Paris Photo 2023. They are the recipients of the Fondation Boghossian visual arts prize in 2022, and have been artists-in-residence at Villa Empain in Belgium in 2024, and with the Ateliers Medicis in France in 2025.