Hiba Kalache is a Lebanese interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, and interactive projects. Originally based in Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, Kalache left her family home in the aftermath of the 2020 port explosion of ammonium nitrate, one of the most devastating nonnuclear explosions in history, which revived political tensions in a country that was already in the throes of civil unrest. Kalache relocated to San Francisco, where she had earned an MFA at California College of the Arts in 2005. The first body of work she produced upon her return attempts to both make sense of the cycles of war that led to her displacement and to channel an imperious force: the will to survive.
Ecology of violence II is one of two paintings that reference the fragile ecosystem that lives on through wars and conflicts. Influenced by research into the transgenerational and psychosomatic effects of trauma, she uses the physicality of the painting process as a means of giving her psychological experiences form. Prioritizing intuitive mark-making over preparatory sketching, her paintings read at first glance like expressionist abstract compositions defined by an explosion of colors and a flurry of dynamic brushstrokes set against the neutral off-white untreated surface of her canvas. It is only in the process of close viewing that representational elements begin to reveal themselves. In Ecology of violence II, the loose marks appear to congeal into blossoms of a funeral wreath, depicted in vivid hues of red, yellow, and green and spilling over a casket beneath. And while any interpretation remains tentative, it is precisely in its ambiguity that the painting becomes a testament to the act of mourning and the transformational power of art.