Maya Sanbar
Maya Sanbar is a multi-disciplinary award-winning artist, curator, and filmmaker with a practice centered on storytelling.
British French Lebanese of Palestinian descent, her mixed background has enabled her to appreciate the diverse human experience. Fluent in several languages, her work seeks to impact positive global change and capture the power of art activism as a vehicle to inspire empathy, cross-cultural introspection, socio-political and environmental consciousness. Her art questions and challenges the boundaries we experience, on a national, psychological, or emotional level.
Sanbar creates site-specific immersive installations at key landmarks such as the Berlin Wall in Germany for the 30th anniversary of Fall of the Wall CHASING THE LIGHT (2019), and the Coronet Theater as part of her interventions with the Kensington and Chelsea Art Festival. One of her installations, WAITING (2015), at Shoreditch Town hall, was a triptych sound and sight experience filmed at a checkpoint in Gaza, experimenting with how contradictions of sight and sound affect our emotional connection with the images on the screen.
Her mixed media and sculpture work is interconnected with her storytelling experience through film. Her most recent sculpture series CONDUITIONS (2020 - ongoing) explores portraits of people, emotions, and energy dynamics, and her upcoming QUILT PATCH (2022) installation with the Chelsea Theatre highlights stories from the local community through emotion flags she has designed.
She has curated several international group exhibitions, including an online exhibition for the United Nations for UNHCR’s 75th Anniversary, and she is on the Advisory Board of Kensington and Chelsea Art Week for which she created 11 films of 360 immersive artist studio visits OPEN DOORS as part of an archive project for the Borough.
‘Conduitions’ Series
Sanbar’s series, Conduitions (2020-2021), has been displayed in three London exhibitions so far. Explores portraits of people, emotions, and energy dynamics, each sculpture is made partly of found objects that conjure the eternal life cycle and our relationships with one another. Air replaces the liquid that once was an element of the sculpture, reminding us of the air we breathe in and out, without control or boundaries. When two sculptures are joined, they resemble living beings in a relationship through the lens of parental bonds, romance, friendships, and internal dialogues with the self.
Each sculpture is a body in this series, distinct in size, shape, and form, just like all of us are inherently unique. The casted layers of papier-mâché and the use of natural materials such as dandelions and feathers represent the ways in which we choose to clothe our bodies and reveal our inner selves. When you strip down the sculptures, they amount to no more than glass bottles, similar to the naked human form. Through the creative process, each layer added to the sculptures creates characters and personalities and accentuates their shape and space. In many ways, the process of molding and casting these sculptures is akin to the everyday act of decorating our bodies. The draping and creases of the papier-mâché emulate folds of clothing and highlight the bottle-like form similar to the way clothing should enhance, not simply conceal the body. The monochromatic color scheme and minimalistic approach enable viewers to see the form rather than the subject.
Sanbar’s sculptures are conceptual and symbolic pieces that encourage visitors to reflect on what they see and use their own experiences to create understandings and perceptions of the work.
Exhibitions Featuring ‘Conduitions’ Series