Hady Sy was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1964[1]. Sy's father was the first Senegalese Ambassador to the Middle East, and his mother came from a well-known Lebanese family of civil servants[2]. The...
Written by
LIAM SIBAI
Hady Sy was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1964[1]. Sy's father was the first Senegalese Ambassador to the Middle East, and his mother came from a well-known Lebanese family of civil servants[2]. The artist earned his bachelor's degree in Communication Arts at the Beirut University College in 1984[3] but then left the country, as the Lebanese civil war entered yet another phase, the war of the camps[4]. He resumed his education in Paris, where he earned a Master's degree at École Française des Attachés de Presse (EFAP) Image et Media, and another in political science at the Sorbonne University[5]. After settling in Paris in 1989, he founded the International Festival of Fashion Photography and worked as its creative director for several years[6]. In 1996, Sy moved to New York and by his second year there became the president of H Design Studio[7]. Hady Sy was also the first plastic artist to participate in Visa Pour L’image, the international festival of photojournalism.
In his artistic practice, Sy is a photographer, a conceptual artist, and somewhat of a researcher. Even within these explicit exercises, he finds exciting methods of exploration and experimentation. Sy's particular multidisciplinary approach is geared to shine a specific light on a variety of social, existential, and geopolitical issues. In Marigramme de L'a'mour, 2018, Sy uses a tool of physical geography to articulate an oscillation in the nature or process of romantic love. The artist's sister, Youmna Erstada , will attest to his 'child's heart,' his compassion, and overall virtuous character[8]. This virtue does not merely happen to be part of the artist's personality but a part of his art's essential premise. Sy's work is articulated in the language of an intense and idealistic humanism.
Hady Sy was one of the millions of people in New York City on September 11, 2001[9]. He saw the events unfold from his loft on 146 Chambers Street in Tribeca. It had become clear to Sy that violence knew no borders. This was where he developed the attitude of charitable dissidence that one can see in projects like In God We Trust, 2004, his first show, and Not For Sale, 2009,an exhibition commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture. The attitude of these shows was epitomized in the phrase now associated with Sy, 'my art is my weapon'. This is where we see the gritty analog aesthetics of X-rayed firearms (all of which had been fired at one point), X-ray self-portraits, and an X-ray of a child soldier and his disproportionately large weapon. French singer and songwriter Camille collaborated with Sy for In God We Trust, recording a unique acapella, God is Sound. Many of the guns were the specific models used in the shootings of John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., and other such well-known occurrences of violence. The shows also included injury X-rays of individuals from different military operations and different periods, across borders as well as causes. They articulated violence and bloodshed as not arriving out of or as part of a particular social civilizational source, but as its own originator; particular social civilizational events arrive out of it.
Sifr, 2017, is an exhibition inquiring into the nominal and fetishistic nature of currency. As the title suggests, the show approaches its subject matter through the notion of 'zero'. The show uses the 'zero dollar bill' in installations, as an image, as one of many inhabitants of an image, even showing enlarged negatives of pieces of currency. One here is invited to consider what it is that makes money valuable since it is undoubtedly nothing inherent to its bodily character. Our current digital and financialized currency often lacks any form of body. Is it what money can buy? If so, why not merely desire what one would buy with money? Big Business, 2016, part of the Dalloul Art Foundation’s collection, is a monochrome photograph displayed at Sifr. It captures a building punctured with bullet holes, drawing attention to the distinct bodies and modes that are reduced to mere commercial relations, to a homogenous soup. When looking at the piece from a particular angle one can see rolls of zero dollar bills in the bullet holes. These works are not just possibly empirical claims about the accumulation of money or the circulation of capital, but a vision of a life amongst their processes. Sy is emphasizing how they function through and within sentient, physical human experience and social existence and how they change it. This is discernable considering the visual vocabulary in use. In Carrots and Sticks, 2015, we see a donkey, a domesticated animal, motivated to march on by a stack of dollars dangling off of rope in front of the animal[10]. Migrants, 2015, show two human skeletons, one an adult's and the other a child's, lying over a stack of zero dollar bills[11].
Sy’s colossal One Blood, 2013, is a project that took four years, and 102 flights. 153 drops of blood were collected from three hundred and sixty six donors. Here Sy highlight the human universality of blood as expressed in its donation. However, also explored is the excluded of certain groups from donating blood. The show included photographic portraits of donors that had contributed to the three hundred and ninety three bags of blood gathered in this process. While preparing One Blood Sy stumbled upon The Canvas.
Any robust humanism needs to remember that it exists in the world. The Canvas, 2011, is a series of photographs taken around the world in crisp sobriety. Sy's only companion and only recurring inhabitant of the images was a canvas. Human consciousness is in many ways like a canvas; it is the world occurring on a plane. There is no such thing as color in the physical world, only in the mind. The mind or the canvas is a thing that the world plugs into. When one mistakes what is in the mind that is articulated for optimal coordination of the universe, for the universe itself, one loses touch with what the mind is. It is crucial for Sy to, in a Heideggerian sense, realign what he is doing with its own nature. The way to have a grounded humanity is to confront the distance between the interior and the exterior and to introduce the notion of the outside into the logic of the inside. In Bhutan Paro we see the canvas hanging off of some tree branches and blowing in the wind[12]. In Greenland, the canvas is on the aforementioned hanger on a snowy day, next to an icy body of water, under a clear blue sky[13]. In China, the canvas is centered along the floor of the great-wall, on its hangar[14].
Hady Sy still lives and creates in Beirut, working towards a small contribution to the city's reconstruction[15].
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