OMAR KHOURI

Dates of residency: January-March 2020
Year of Birth: 1978
Hometown: Koura, North Lebanon
Lives and works: North Lebanon
Education: 
2002 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Illistration, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, USA

THE ARTIST
Omar Khouri is an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, comics, music and among others. In 2006, he co-founded Samandal Comics, the first experimental comics collective in the Middle East credited for starting the recent comic book revolution in the Arab world. Omar’s work has been exhibited and is held in collections around the world including Lebanon, the UK, the US, Japan, and across Europe. Recent shows include ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ (2019 – 2020) at the BAR Project Space, Beirut, ‘Glass’ (2018 - 2019) at the Park Gallery, London, ‘Exhibitionist’ (2018), a site-specific intervention at La Vitrine, Beirut and ‘Face Value: Portraiture’ (2018) a group show at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut.

THE RESIDENCY
As a multi-disciplinary artist, Omar tends to choose the form of his next project based on what medium can better help him deconstruct, question and rebuild the current branch of his interests. Under the monicker of RUOK, his new solo musical alter ego, Khouri delves into the theme of Happiness as it relates to the giant interconnected shifts in the global, national and personal narratives of the past year. Experimenting with classical piano compositions, alt pop, noise funk, and krautrock (to name a few), this is just another leg in the artist’s journey exploring the cosmic spaces between individual minds and the underlying loneliness of being that paradoxically connects us all.