Safe Waters, an exhibition by Monya Riachi
Lewisham Arthouse | 8 – 16 February 2025 | 12-6pm
Opening Night | 7 February 2025 | 6-9pm
Artist Talk | 7 February 2025 | 5-6pm

The Arab British Centre is proud to support Safe Waters, an exhibition by Monya Riachi.

The show marks the culmination of research developed during Riachi’s yearlong residency award at Lewisham Arthouse. The work starts by considering the very building it is exhibited in, the year of its construction and the story of the founding of Lewisham, before exploring their ties – through material, resource and power – to the continued violence on the land from which the artist comes: the Levant. Drawing connections across geographies and time, Riachi uses maps, salt, water and the poppy as both subjects and materials to create a site-specific installation that holds notions of a history, as well as our present.

Safe Waters received public funding from Arts Council England and received curatorial support from Jessica El Mal as part of As We Are, Might Have Been and Could Be, the Arab British Centre’s three-year visual arts and talent development programme supported by Freelands Foundation.

About the artist

Monya Riachi is an interdisciplinary artist. Her practice is material driven and research-led, and is realized through installation, sculpture, moving image, performance and writing. Her work centres matter as a site of narrative and archive, and engages with themes around loss, ecological transformation, the politics of land and time, and the entanglement of histories of her home and adopted countries Lebanon and Britain. Her research draws on feminist new materialist philosophy and quantum entanglement theory to disclose how matter is generative in creating [new matter and] new worlds.

Monya is based in London and works between the United Kingdom and Lebanon. She is the recipient of the 2024 Boghossian Foundation Visual Arts Prize, and the 2024 Lewisham Arthouse Graduate Award. Her work has been exhibited in London, Beirut and Glasgow. Previous residencies include ‘Material Futures’ at Cove Park, ‘Neither at Land Nor at Sea’ with Cittadellarte, and Ashkal Alwan Studio Residency in Beirut. She holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art.