/ Raja Khairallah

Raja Khairallah (1987) is an emerging Italian-Lebanese photographer and video maker. She graduated from the Albertina Academy of Fine Art in Turin in cinematographic scenography (2008). She worked as a set designer on Eleven Hours of Joy (2018, Italy/UK, 15 min), a short romantic film directed by Carlotta Beck Peccoz. She is a recipient of the Varese Art Award (IV edition • 2012). Raja has strong links with American-Italian artist Victor Kastelic (1964), in whose gallery Kspaces her work was included in many collective shows: Black and White Nights (2018), The Greatest Things/Le cose migliori (2018), Small History (2018) and Foreshadows/Prefigurazioni (2019).

The centre of her work is an interest in revealing the introspective nature of what surrounds us and the underrated imagery in which we live every day. The human being, the object of her research, is immortalized in a mixture of spirituality and materiality. Taking advantage of this antinomy, her technique combines total darkness with extreme light in a cathartic act that tends to deconstruct the idea of ​​a clear and distinct vision in an introspective view of one's conscience.

The judgment is suspended on the hypothesis. Go beyond all the frontiers of the senses. Trying to foresee where it is not yet seen. Blind man's buff.
– Raja Khairallah on the "Mosca ceica" ("Blind Man's Buff") series (2022)

Blindfolded, bound and potentially surrounded, vulnerable to physical harm or ridicule. The only defence is a courageous reaching out, probing, touching, and grasping. In line with most of her latest work, Raja’s touching series of female nude photography goes beyond the empirical, physical description of the body so common in today’s photography. These works venture into corporal and psychological pasts and futures. They are bodies in transformation through subtle movement and time. Light, at times overpowering or else waning towards darkness, becomes the timekeeper that robs the viewer of a sense of a conclusion but empowers us to see into the perpetual.
– Kspaces Archive, Turin (2022)