REVENGE № 2: Zine Release & Live Performance with Tracy Chahwan

Tracy Chahwan presents Revenge No.2, a zine release and live performance featuring Puppets of Babylon playing music while Tracy performs live drawing!

Studio 34’s Exhibiting artist Tracy Chahwan is publishing a new 36-page comics zine entitled Revenge No.2 by acclaimed Lebanese comics collective Samandal. This issue features contributions by Tracy along with Rami Tannous, Lena Merhej, Karen Keyrouz, Carl Aouad, Joseph kai, Nour Hifaoui, Raphaelle Macaron, Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, and Barrack Rima.

This issue reflects on themes of resistance, histories of movement, empathy and narratives of survival in Lebanon and Palestine. Come celebrate its release and maybe buy a copy. Additionally, Tracy will perform some live drawing using an overhead projector, accompanied by the music of Omar Dewachi, aka Puppets of Babylon. 

Tracy Chahwan’s first solo show, Alien of Extraordinary Abilities, will be up in Studio 34’s gallery until early June. Posters, tapestries, and now comics are for sale by the artist. Learn more about Tracy and the show from this TV news coverage and also this public media piece about Tracy and Studio 34.

ARTIST BIOS:

Tracy Chahwan’s work first appeared on the walls of Beirut as street art and posters for local independent music venues like the Beirut Groove Collective, Yukunkun Club, and Metro al Madina. She joined the Lebanese experimental comics collectives Samandal and Zeez to publish anthologies, magazines, and her first graphic novel, Beirut Bloody Beirut (Hachette, 2018). During the 2019 uprisings, she took to the streets with friends and colleagues to occupy public spaces, offering free screen printing workstations to create posters, T-shirts, and protest signs.  In 2020, Chahwan relocated to the United States. She did a fellowship with the YallaPunk collective in 2021 and began working on journalistic comics in projects like Guantanamo Voices (Abrams), Where to Marie? Stories of Feminisms in Lebanon, and media platforms including The Nib. In 2023, she took part in La La Lil Jidar: 20 Years Behind the Apartheid Wall, which had a two-month residency at Studio 34.

She created an installation work of seven woven tapestries for Do Arabs Dream of Electric Sheep? a 2023 group exhibition in Dubai and, in 2024, co-created the play The Suicide with theatre artists Lianne Souki and Lynn Hodeib.Tracy Chahwan's illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Wetransfer, Middle East Eye. and Vice Arabia . She continues to travel between the U.S. and the Levant, thinking, drawing, and doing her best to bear witness to the many strange madnesses unfolding all around us. See more at tracychahwan.com.

Omar Dewachi is an Iraqi-Canadian academic and sound artist based in New York City. Skilled in classical Iraqi and Arabic music, he performs across Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Since 2018, he has been involved in sound design and music composition for theater, alongside his experimental and electronic music projects under the alias "Puppets of Babylon." At Rutgers University, he teaches anthropology and researches the history of medicine and science in the Middle East

Alien of Extraordinary Abilities was made possible with generous support from Fireball Printing. See what they can do at fireballprinting.com. Thanks also to La La Lil Jidar and Renata's Kitchen for supply food for the opening reception!