Lara Zankoul

The artist.

Lara Zankoul is a Lebanese interdisciplinary artist. Growing up between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, Lara became interested in art from a very young age. She used to attend art exhibitions, look at photos from fashion magazines and dream of one day capturing photos like the ones she was seeing. At the time, pursuing a creative career didn’t seem possible so she decided to study economics and started her first job as an economics researcher. Soon after, Lara’s dissatisfaction with the nature of her job led her to buy a camera and she began teaching herself photography. Her surrealist style of art came very naturally as a way to escape reality - be it the daily life of the cubicle, social pressures, the challenges of living in a politically unstable country and so on. Lara used photography to escape reality rather than document it.

It started by defying gravity, photographing misplaced objects, changing the function of objects, or playing with proportions. All of these techniques led to the surreal aspect visible in her work. Using the camera - which was primarily created to capture reality - to document surrealism was the challenge that kept Lara passionate. She captures everyday human behavior and issues that occur within society through photographic media. Lara’s signature work not only stands out in its conceptual identity, but also in its surrealism. As a self-taught photographer, she focuses on experimentation and world building within her photographs in order to create moments and ways to craft them. She has been featured in a number of exhibitions: locally, in group and solo exhibitions in Ayyam Gallery and at Art Lounge, Beirut. On an international scale, she has been showcased in the Guy Hepner Gallery in New York and HEIST Gallery in London. Lara’s aim is to invite the viewers to come up with their own interpretation and understanding of her photographs and the stories behind them. Most recently, Lara has dived into the NFT space and added 3D aspects to her work.