Artist
Lara Baladi
Via Cairo, Egypt
Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi is internationally recognized for her multidisciplinary work, which weaves personal and socio-political narratives into mutable and non-linear expressions of cultural memory. In her investigations into myth, archives and personal histories, Baladi makes use of a wide range of mediums including architecture, installations, photography, collage, tapestry, perfume and sculpture. In 2003, she received a fellowship from the Japan Foundation to research anime. Her ephemeral construction and sound installation Borg el Amal (Tower of Hope) won first prize at the 2008-09 Cairo Biennale. For the inaugural Kiev Biennale in 2012, Baladi collaborated with the Kiev Kamera Orchestra. She has been an artist in residency at VASL (Karachi, Pakistan, 2010) and Art Omi International Arts Center (Hudson, New York, 2014), among other places. For the summer 2015, she will be in residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.
In 2006, Baladi founded and curated the artist residency Fenenin el Rehal (Nomadic Artists) in Egypt’s White Desert. She has been a board member of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) since it's creation in 1997. During the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, Baladi co-founded two media initiatives, Tahrir Cinema and Radio Tahrir, the first free Egyptian online radio. In 2014, she began serving on the advisory board of R-Shief, a historical online archive and media system. She also became a board member of the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art in Cairo. Since fall 2014 she has been a Fellow at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, where she is researching and developing the transmedia project Vox Populi, Archiving a Revolution in the Digital Age. Baladi’s work is represented by the Grimaldi Gavin Gallery in London.
