About the Exhibition.

TMR is pleased to present Isthmus, an immersive experimental project by Iraqi-born, Los Angeles-based artist Susu Attar. This exhibition marks Attar’s first institutional solo show in LA. Attar’s practice explores the ways images of embodied subjects circulate in a media saturated world and how this digitized circulation impacts the meaning-making potential of pictures. For this project Attar takes media images from within contexts of violence and turmoil, and re-positions the corporeal forms that emerge from these moments through the language of painting.  Using the gallery space as a kind of inhabitable plane or atmospheric terrain, Attar paints these bodies, isolated, on draping scrolls that are sited throughout the space—as if floating between air, water, and land.  The human-scale figures spill off of the walls into the space of the viewer and onto the floor, placing the painted bodies and our bodies in a constantly shifting relationship. Pointing to the isthmus as liminal space between two worlds, the installation challenges the boundaries between photography and painting. Ultimately, throughout the various manifestations of her work, Attar leads us on a search for moments of empathy and transformation. In our role as viewers, we are engaged in a meditation on the fundamental importance of bearing witness, the work of art (its status as object and action), and the hope that lies in the transformative potential of the artistic gesture.