LARA CHAHINE, REEM FALAKNAZ

Lara Chahine and Reem Falaknaz subvert a common documentary landscape in Swallow This! with works in photography and digital media. The exhibition explores the rampant pathologisation of women’s bodies, where the politically absurd, visually surreal, and humorous converge. Drawing on the uncanny collective experience of womanhood, Chahine and Falaknaz veer into a kind of performance art, becoming the subjects of their own work at times. In Bless Your Beauty, Lebanon-based photographer Lara Chahine explores the pressure to attain ‘sacred’ beauty ideals, at any cost—physical, emotional, and financial. In Reem Falaknaz’s If a hymen breaks and no one hears it, the Oman-based photographer presents research into hymen repair remedies, documenting conversations with muftis, herbalists, sheikhs, doctors, and sorcerers. Swallow This! weaves narratives where the clinical or scientific, the grotesque or bodily, the divine or occult coexist as contemporary reflections on a post-internet, Arab feminism. Both photographers seek to unpack “erotic capital”, where the strange is made familiar, and the familiar, strange.