Tara Sakhi (b. 1989, Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-Polish architect whose work empowers a material interpretation of ritual, memory, rupture, and the unspoken gestures that hold people to one another. Rather than settling into a single medium, the artist moves restlessly between them, treating each new material as a question to be asked rather than a technique to be mastered. Since repair and inheritance are always inextricably linked to ancestral ritual, Sakhi’s research revolves around the evocation of these gestures and how they echo in the habits of contemporary life.

Tara Sakhi’s works are not only material and cultural shapeshifters, but function as literal hosts to numerous realities: architecture merges seamlessly with object, Beirut with Venice, the ceremonial with the everyday, ruin with ornament, the collective with the intimate. As displacement and reconstruction are always inextricably linked with the Lebanese experience, her practice arises from gathering these stimuli and firing them into propositions for how a generation might still be brought to sit down together. Spanning small-scale architecture, urban public installations, interiors, collectible objects and scenography, and shown from Beirut and Venice to Paris, New York, Milan, London and Dubai, the works meet us halfway through their tactility. It thus takes no effort to imagine that all these pieces go on speaking once the guests have left, quietly turning the room into the last place anyone is willing to leave.