Diary of the Future: Lara Baladi

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde presents Diary of the Future, a solo exhibition by Egyptian-Lebanese artist Lara Baladi. The works in this exhibition emerge from a personal ritual that developed during the final months of the artist’s father’s illness. Visitors to the family home gathered around the bedside and shared Turkish coffee, after which the remaining grounds were read in the traditional practice of tasseography. Baladi photographed the patterns left inside the cups and began assembling them into intricate photographic compositions.

These images form the basis of the Diary of the Future series. Each photograph captures the residue of a moment of conversation, grief and hope. Arranged in grids and radial formations, the individual images become complex visual constellations that evoke maps, mandalas or cosmological diagrams.

The works reflect on the relationship between chance and destiny, between the intimate moment of the coffee reading and the broader narratives of memory and loss. What begins as a private ritual gradually becomes a collective portrait of a community gathered around a moment of transition.

Baladi’s practice moves fluidly between photography, installation and montage, often combining archival imagery with personal documentation. In Diary of the Future, the ephemeral traces of coffee grounds are transformed into contemplative visual structures that invite the viewer to reflect on fate, time and the fragility of human life.

The exhibition includes several large-scale photographic compositions from the Diary of the Future series, in which hundreds of individual cup images are assembled into expansive visual fields.