Annie Kurkdjian's art brings the drawing and therefore the shadows in the foreground. Her works invite us to stroll through dense, soothing psyches, where the drawing, which is not unrelated to Topor's work, conveys the characters' solitude and isolation. Yet it offers a harmony resulting from a form of adaptation to the emotional, physical or circumstantial elements of life. The characters are bold even as they have to bend to these constrained spaces. The precariousness of the situations envisaged destabilizes us and it is difficult to know where the characters of Kurkdjian are in the journey that she has assigned to them and what remains for them to accomplish. It is undoubtedly this dimension of the unfinished, of the secret that Kurkdjian's cats illustrate. Everything seems fluid, uncertain, while her emblematic hands materialize this desire to cling to the tangible to return to a more solid reality.  These works were created in the context of a local crisis which is hitting hard, "a dying country, where everything is sinking, every day, a little more, in disorder and suffering".  Conversely, in her lighter portraits, this same fluidity is summoned to translate hope, thirst for living fully, love. The softness of a pillow is a welcome change from the hardness of other things, and perhaps a loving embrace signals a yearning for a protective home. "We integrate into life in the end, whatever the context, and even if the spaces, the places are uncomfortable, even in Lebanon." “Staying human, saving your soul” becomes a challenge as Kurkdjian presents this exhibition in tribute to the Lebanese people who continue to survive with courage, beauty and an otherworldly resilience.

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Born in Beirut in 1972, Annie Kurkdjian lived there for sixteen years of civil war. It is a childhood marked by the sound of bombs, terror, permanent insecurity, the irregularity of ordinary things. Armenian, she already carries within her, through the story of her grandmother, the trauma of the genocide. At 12, as the family prepares to flee Lebanon to France, she loses her father in a violent murder for theft and discovers the next day, in the newspapers, the photograph of his body lying, riddled with bullets. As a young adult, she suffered from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and realized that she had to find an outlet for the suffering inscribed in her body. After studying management, art, psychology and finally theology, Anny Kurkdjian continued her training with a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University. In 2005, she then began her “new life” with regular exhibitions in France, Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan and several other countries. She is the winner of the City of Fontenay-sous-Bois Prize (2014), the Jouhayna Badour Prize (2012), the First Prize for Figurative Painting of the Atelier-Z (2011) and the Special Mention of the Jury at the Salon Sursock. , Beirut (2010). Her work has been exhibited in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, UK and USA. The collections of the Museum of Tesse, Du Mans (France), the University of Balamand (Lebanon) and the Town Hall of Fontenay-sous-Bois in France, as well as many private collections have acquired some of his works. She describes her art as a form of self-therapy and describes her work as "existential" paintings in which she explores people and their relationships with each other.

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