Rida Abdallah at Villa Empain: 'My work is a kind of exorcism'

Artist Rida Abdallah was born in Beirut and came to Europe in the early 1990s. He was recently invited for a residency at Villa Empain to learn how to work with a new technique. The theme was the crises in the Middle East and more specifically Lebanon. "I have to distance myself in order to work. But it is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it affects me, on the other hand my work has something liberating. It's a kind of exorcism."