INTRODUCTION BY EVA KIRSCH

Welcome to RAFFMA! Our first exhibition in 2019, DARKEVENTWHITEHORIZON, features a new body of work by Rabbia Sukkarieh, a Southern California artist, born and raised in Lebanon, who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. In her abstract, visually intense work including pencil drawings, digital prints, oil paintings and wool sculptures, Sukkarieh talks about the dual nature of human condition and existence, about the failings and risings of people. She chooses abstraction as her artistic language, and her perspective is actual, which makes her work strong and effective. Her experience of the brutality of war, senseless destruction, pain of separation, displacement and loss is first-hand and very real, as she lived through the civil war in her native country of Lebanon during her young, formative years and early adulthood. Also there, during the dark days, she witnessed many bright examples of humanity, simple good-ness of one’s heart and unconditional support people offered to one another. All of those first-hand memories and the experience of processing them strongly define Sukkarieh’s work, which is saturated with intense emotions and, at the same time, also amazingly filtered, structured and controlled. When I gave a tour of the exhibition to a group of students, six- and seventh-graders from one of the local schools, the students easily grasped the essential duality of DARKEVENTWHITEHORIZON, not even knowing the exhibition’s title. They did it just by looking and sharing their observations with others before I introduced them to any information about the artist and the exhibition. It was an amazingly powerful experience…

My warm thank you goes to the exhibition’s curator, Jay Belloli, for introducing RAFFMA to the artist and her work, and for contributing to the exhibition’s success in many different ways. Many thanks also go to Rabbia Sukkarieh for all her passionate involvement in many of the exhibition’s aspects, and to dedicated supporters of the museum, who made this and other exhibitions possible. And last but not least, I thank all the dedicated RAFFMA staff and student assistants, who conceived, designed, installed and promoted the exhibition, as well as successfully planned and organized all the accompanying programs. As always, I am very grateful to them, and appreciative of their talents and dedication.

Thank you All!

Eva Kirsch

Director