Rita-Josy Haddoub | Pawel Dziadur
Concrete and The Immaterial 

The Koppel Project and Sunend present Concrete and The Immaterial, a culmination of more than five years of collaboration between artists Rita-Josy Haddoub and Paweł Dziadur. The exhibition and symposium will run from 18 June to 11 July 2025 at Annex London, open daily.

Concrete is more than just a building material. In understanding constructed ecologies, it becomes a symbol of collapse, resilience, progress and unresolved histories. In Beirut, Lebanon, cracked, unfinished, and reused concrete fills the landscape, while in Kraków, Poland concrete is found in solid forms expressing a national vision. For artists Rita-Josy Haddoub and Pawel Dziadur, from these respective cities, concrete tells a story of a city and region shaped by conflict, economic decay, and dreams of transformation. One half of the exhibition space is occupied by Dziadur’s large-scale textile spectrograms installation works with humanoid structures, the other half is occupied by Haddoub’s investigation of the production of concrete within a conflict zone, these surround the centrepiece of the exhibition, the result of their collaboration, the electronically activated interactive cinder blocks in Beyond Us, which with the inscribed words and sounds investigate feelings of loss and vertigo.

Rita-Josy Haddoub is a Lebanese artist whose work explores the politics and emotions hidden in Beirut’s built environment. Using materials like cement, DIY electronics, and textiles, she examines how the city’s structures reflect its painful history and political instability. Her recent research undertaking, titled Concrete and the Search for the Immaterial, looks into the emotional and social meanings behind Beirut’s unfinished buildings. These structures function as clues to deeper stories of war, corruption, and geopolitical complexities. Haddoub's technical approach extends into the emotional. She argues that the visible materials of the city, such as concrete, are soaked with invisible feelings like anxiety, despair, and resistance. In her work we find expression of, which she calls "infrastructures of feeling," as part of daily life. 

Haddoub’s photographs and film, in Photo-Inquiry Into Manufacturing Beirut, 2020-2025, go to the source of the concrete that is used in makeshift ways around the city, supporting shelves, replacing table legs, or piling up in corners like forgotten promises. The life-scale film in the exhibition gives us a sense of immersion into the world of the making of these blocks in the factory, also used in the interactive sculptural works in Beyond Us, placed on points around the space. The film and the still photographs give a new layer of meaning to the gestures and the choreography of the production process. The black and white pictures exude a melancholy that recalls the feelings of ambiguity between the potential they carry of either to be simply lugged around the city, destroyed in blasts, or provide the scaffolding for a long-term support and growth of lives that depend upon it. The material and political complexities of Beirut’s industrial landscape are brought into direct engagement, capturing moments of contamination and amity within and beyond the manufacturing site, where the cinder block is an active participant in the city’s emotional and structural life.

Pawel Dziadur, originally from Kraków, Poland, takes a different but equally powerful approach. His practice focuses on how technology, particularly surveillance and digital networks, shape our experience of the world. Using motion capture suits, EEG brainwave sensors, and camera systems, Dziadur creates installations that reveal how invisible systems of control affect our environments. His work often explores how sound and light interact with human presence. 

Dziadur’s series of kinetic Jacquard-based installation works in the exhibition integrate historical memory, politics, sound and visual technology to investigate how national traumas and ideologies are encoded in visual culture and collective consciousness. Each textile acts as a visual spectrogram, scanned by rotating cameras that convert the woven imagery into sound using custom software. In Yes to the Body, characters from 1930s Nazi Germany running ecstatically towards the sea, symbols of a social project that gave bodily health significant cultural importance, are reanimated as sonic remnants of WWII bombings. In Another Day in the Office, a glitchy video still of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, moments after a failed prorogation of the UK Parliament, is rendered in a style traditionally reserved for noble tapestries, satirising the corruption of leadership. Yoga V1 juxtaposes a serene yoga pose with the sound of incoming V1 rockets and Xenakis-style graphic composition, drawing a disturbing link between an ancient ritual seeking transcendence and wartime violence. Finally, Et in Terra overlays the Latin Lord’s Prayer with the sound of rockets from the 2021 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, turning religious invocation into a brutal, unresolved prayer for peace. Across the works, the viewer is part of the soundscape as their movement and colour influence the noise produced.

In Beyond Us, developed during a residency at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, Haddoub in collaboration with Dziadur, creates an eerie, nostalgic, and exhilarating environment. The interactive installation recreates six large-scale béton hollow blocks, each 60 x 40 x 20 centimetres and weighing 40 kilograms, embedded with stainless steel fibre, electronics, and sound feedback systems. These blocks are defamiliarised and reanimated, asking how we might locate ourselves within computational infrastructures defined by changing landscapes and demographics. The works look at built systems designed to manage territory and populations, implicating technological infrastructures in the assertion of political control in ongoing conflicts and strategies of physical domination. By turning data and code into physical experiences, they render invisible systems of power into tactile, audible, spatial forms. within global economy shape this series of works, drawn from five years of collaborative and individual art and research by Rita Haddoub and Paweł Dziadur. The work reflects on the interfaced city amidst developmental destruction, putting into conversation infrastructural shifts and industrial accelerations. Concrete becomes the relic of capital, reorganising landscapes, subjectivities, and temporalities, while raising the question of whose modernity is being constructed, and to what end?

Haddoub, through the symposiums she curated that will be held during the exhibition through July 11th, expands her practice of imagining and creating new relationships between people and the places they live in by building alternative futures. For her, this involves questioning the traditional meaning of urban progress, where unfinished buildings are read as possible spaces of re-imagination. For Dziadur, it is recognising how technology can help in finding ways to make sense of authority operating through everyday things like lenses and sensors. Through their collaboration the artists bring us into the proximity of contradictions where rubble offers both weight and intimacy, and where technological surveillance, ancient ritual, political ruin, and industrial debris form the raw material of a contemporary cultural cartography.

Hero: connect@sunend.org