Exhibition on @blakeandvargas until the 14th of October. Opening hours, Friday To Sunday from 3 to 7 pm. Part of @berlinartprize Backbone is an exhibition by Mazen Khaddaj (Aley, Lebanon, 1985) in memory of his father, Melhem Khaddaj. The artist's father died in December 2020 after a long battle with COVID-19. In a series of live video performances and multichannel videos, all from 2021, along with sculptural, installative elements,Backbone conjoins the entangled themes of grief, love, and family ties, as well as queer and Lebanese Druze identity in an affective tour de force. A deeply personal narration of the artist's reckoning with his father's death, the show and its title relate not to only one but instead a plurality of backbones – the father as the backbone of a family, the family unit as the backbone of society, the backbone an individual must possess to embrace their identity within a society that does not condone it, the backbone that never breaks even when the heart is ripped to pieces. Khaddaj uses his body as a radical artistic medium to express and transport experiences of extreme emotional intensity – lending a corporeal form to the internal as the ultimate means of embodiment. In stark, reduced scenes with no or few props, a static camera and no or only minimal editing, sound derived only from the movements of the body itself, everything unnecessary is cut from these works – rendering their impact all the more gut-wrenchingly physical. Photographer @sandra.gramm Courtesy of @berlinartprize https://www.instagram.com/p/Ci41RRpMSBv/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=