Lebanese artist, born in Dubai (1984)
Born into a Lebanese family in Dubai on 26 February 1984, Rabáh El A’awar has been drawn to art since childhood. Early practice in drawing and Arabic calligraphy led, by age 17, to bilingual poetry publications. During university, a Modern Art course revealed his true vocation. Although allergic reactions forced him to abandon painting, El A’awar found lasting expression in photography, digital art, and sound.
His works, often abstract, symmetrical, and infused with humanism, explore sociopolitical and metaphysical themes through the lens of his personal philosophy, Atmospherism, where light, mood, and structure become emotional architecture. He situates his practice within Metamodernism and Post-Conceptualism, bridging sincerity and intellect, emotion and geometry.
At twenty-eight, after developing arthritis, El A’awar began transforming physical pain into visual myth. This period marked the birth of his Reinventionist Aesthetic, a personal visual doctrine he defines as:
“A process of inventing or remaking an existing artwork all over again (or anew) using the actual artwork as an input reference (whether entirely, partially, or representationally) to produce an output that may intentionally differ from the original’s composition, function, or identity.”
While inspired by Allan Kaprow’s idea of reinvention, El A’awar’s Reinventionist Aesthetic diverges sharply: Kaprow reinvented actions and environments, whereas El A’awar reinvents imagery itself, folding bodily form or architecture into kaleidoscopic, anthropomorphic, mythological, or otherworldly structures. One such Reinventionist series, “The Imponderables”, includes “What Goes Around… Comes Around” (2015), which received a LensCulture Editors’ Pick.
This “reinvention” of the self later shaped his architectural and portrait photography, including “Reveries” (2019): a metamodern exploration of urban solitude and dreaming, where human emotion and city architecture mirror one another in quiet dialogue. Within this series, El A’awar employs a Post-Appropriation approach, drawing on the visual memory of iconic artworks without replicating them. Certain portraits resonate with the confrontational staging of Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face)” (1981), not through imitation, but through the lingering presence of Kruger’s challenge to power, authorship, and the act of looking; an influence that lives in the artist’s consciousness and subtly guides his photographic language.
On 8 December 2022, El A’awar’s first sound artwork was included in Kabir Mohanty’s installation “An Offer from the Desert” (2022), presented in an exhibition by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi at the Abu Dhabi Creative Hub, where it remained on view for two months. The installation followed an intensive sound-based workshop conducted by Mohanty with selected artists, after which El A’awar was invited by fellow participant Spencer Hogg to collaborate. Their resulting piece, “Uncreation” (2022), transformed El A’awar’s teenage poem “The Suffering Soul” (2000) into a darkly resonant soundscape structured through inversion, layering, and emotional rupture.
In addition, El A’awar has exhibited internationally, including The Brick Lane Gallery (London), Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Houston, Livorno, Trapani, Castellabate, and Caltabellotta. He is also co-founder of The New Symmetry Movement (2019) and part of the collaborative duo El A’awar & Mullen, creators of Invasive Art: a post-conceptual performance and photographic practice where the artists “invade” artworks and spaces, positioning themselves within existing visual or historical contexts to expose and reframe the relationship between identity, presence, and the image.
