Artist Statement
My body has been the greatest struggle in my life, and learning to coexist with it guides me as an artist. Having developed severe chronic pain as an adolescent due to a condition in my legs, my practice is defined by the resolve to endure often invisible struggles. Exploring the implications of durational and site-specific performance, I’m hyper-aware of physicality. The fight to retain mobility taught me the balance of determination and patience, finding expression in the extremity of my art.
Since age 20, I have studied, lived and attended artist residencies in the Middle East and North Africa. There I learned to speak Arabic and became directly aware of the plight of Syrian, Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. I’ve taken part in projects for refugee solidarity that brought me to the largest camps in Jordan and Lebanon, and put me in contact with the founders and directors of numerous humanitarian efforts, both in that region and the US. My practice inevitably draws upon these experiences.
In 2020 I met my life partner, Vanessa Dahbour, a designer of Palestinian and Native American descent. A year later we started the social justice apparel brand For Your Viewing Pleasure to support humanitarian and liberation work for her people. Pictured above is myself in one of our t-shirts.
My time and energy is spent between art and FYVP, often overlapping. To learn more about what we do/how we organize please visit: foryourviewingpleasure.co
Bio
Lara lives in Los Angeles, California. She has had nine solo and over thirty group exhibitions in the U.S., Cyprus, Germany, Lebanon, Morocco and Cuba. Lara has presented work at institutions such as The Wende Museum of the Cold War, LA Contemporary Exhibitions and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles; as well as at SomoS Arts and The Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, Germany. She has a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Lara was awarded the Grand Prix of the 2021 Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus for her performance saline dissonance. Her work has been reviewed in Los Angeles, Berlin, Beirut and Cyprus in publications such as Artforum, Space On Space, The Invisible Archive, Alpha News, and the Los Angeles Daily News.
Lara has an intermittent collaboration with Regina Mamou as Research for the Bermuda Triangle: researchbermudatriangle.xyz