“Art Now in Lebanon”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Rayyane Tabet’s Fossils is an installation of vintage suitcases
covered in concrete. In formal terms, it fuses the immediacy of
Mona Hatoum’s Traffic (a 2002 sculpture featuring two suitcases
with human hair spilling out the sides and connecting one to the
other) with the solemnity of Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Pair)
(a 1999 installation of 18 cast bronze mortuary slabs, painted
white and coupled, one convex, one concave).
The installation was exhibited for the first time in Beirut
during the summer of 2006. It framed the entrance to the
exhibition “Moving Home(s),” which opened on July 6 at Galerie
Sfeir-Semler in Karantina. Tabet placed his different-sized
suitcases on the gallery’s floor in pairs and trios throughout
the foyer of the cool, minimal 1,000-square-meter
post-industrial space. A few suitcases stood off on their own,
alone.
In a show that included works by a number of highly established,
internationally renowned artists, Tabet’s piece stood. Not bad
for 23-year-old making his gallery debut. But there was an
unconscionable cruelty to the fact that six days after the
exhibition opened, war with Israel broke out in Lebanon. For 34
days, the country was bombed and besieged. An artwork that was
meant to glance back on the history of past wars in Lebanon –
and grapple with the accumulated psychic damage and wounded
behavioral patterns that those conflicts wrought – was suddenly
plunged into the context of all too present war. Those concrete
covered suitcases were ripped from pensive reflection to
visceral relevance and resonance.
The exhibition “Art Now in Lebanon,” on view at Darat al-Funun
from March 4 through May 29, marks the second appearance of
Tabet’s Fossils. This time around, the pieces appear heavier,
their shape more streamlined and their surface further
abstracted. In the intervening years, Tabet has added new layers
of concrete to the suitcases. The effect is haunting. The
thicker concrete creates a physical manifestation of the
catastrophic pile-up that is Lebanon’s ever-unfolding history of
violence, and an intimate, emotional attempt at keeping one’s
mind safe from harm.
Curated by Andrée Sfeir-Semler, “Art Now in Lebanon” offers
neither an exhaustive retrospective of critical art practices as
they have emerged in Beirut in the last fifteen years, nor a
comprehensive survey of contemporary cultural production in
Lebanon as it is being expressed now. Rather, the exhibition
presents a highly selective collection of works by artists whose
subjects and strategies converge as often as they diverge. The
show makes masterful use of the various venues Darat al-Funun
affords, and rests on curatorial gestures that are both
sensitive and assertive.
“Art Now in Lebanon” includes 39 works by 14 artists who were
born between 1964 and 1983. There are videos, photographs,
drawings, ink-and-watercolor works on paper, sculptures, an
enormous map of Beirut (by Marwan Rechmaoui) made from tough
black rubber that visitors are expected to walk all over and
stacks of texts and posters (by Walid Sadek and Akram Zaatari,
respectively) that viewers are encouraged to take home.
Some of the artists featured in the exhibition have been active
for more than a decade and have earned international art-world
clout. Walid Raad, for example, is a critics’ darling and a
veteran of Documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney
Biennial; Zaatari and Rabih Mroué are both showing new work in
Paris’ Centre Pompidou, for the concurrent, Middle East-themed
exhibition “Les Inquiets,” which runs February 12 through May
19; Jalal Toufic is the author of eight books, seven videos and
five multimedia projects, and is generally considered the
cerebral core of the group. Other artists, however, are
relatively new to the scene, such as Rayyane Tabet and Randa
Mirza, who each only recently finished university studies.
It is worth noting that “Art Now in Lebanon” is the first major
exhibition of its kind to be shown in the Arab world since
“Missing Links,” an exhibition at Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery of
Contemporary Art organized by Ashkal Alwan’s Christine Tohme in
2001. Nothing on this scale has ever been staged in Beirut.
Every year, Lebanon’s Sursock Museum hosts the Salon d’Automne,
a juried, invitational exhibition that offers, perhaps, the most
accurate cross-section of mainstream contemporary art now in
Lebanon. But the results tend to be a mixed bag. Ashkal Alwan’s
Home Works Forum, established in 2001, highlights the kindred
concerns among artists who are working on the cutting edge of
cultural practices. But the scope is impressively international
rather than regional or local, and the atmosphere is like an
intense incubator for discourse than informs, complicates and
emanates from the works themselves. Recent exhibitions of
Lebanese art in other Arab countries typically emphasize the
paintings and sculptures of an older generation, not the
conceptual concerns of figures such as Sadek, for example, which
have been instrumental in redefining the role and purpose of
contemporary art in Lebanon from decorative accoutrement to
critical tool.
That said, a number of Beirut-centric exhibitions has been shown
outside of the region, including Catherine David’s “Contemporary
Arab Representations” and Suzanne Cotter’s “Out of Beirut.” In
the absence of an existing institutional infrastructure for
contemporary art in the Arab world, exhibitions like these are
crucial for writing the region’s art history, and for
establishing its canon.
“Art Now in Lebanon” brings to the art-going public in Amman
examples of how and why Beirut’s contemporary art scene has come
to wield so much influence. Over the past five years, several of
the artists in the exhibition have participated in international
biennials, gallery shows and festivals for film, theater, video
and performance. Numerous art journals have devoted special
issues to Beirut. Lebanon inaugurated its first national
pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, one of very few Arab
states to do so. As the critic T.J. Demos noted in the Summer
2007 issue of Art Journal: “Distant though it may be
geographically from European and American cultural capitals,
Beirut nevertheless emerges … as fully central to the most
pressing questions – political, aesthetic, ethical,
institutional – that animate artistic and curatorial practices
today.”
Since the early 1990s, independent organizations such as Ashkal
Alwan, the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut DC, Irtijal, Ne a
Beyrouth and more have created an alternative infrastructure for
artistic expression and developed intriguing new channels for
the production and presentation of new work. The artists present
in “Art Now in Lebanon” have, for the most part, worked with
them all. In doing so, they have been able to experiment in an
atmosphere relatively free, at least at the outset, from market
pressures. As a result, they have shifted away from paintings
and sculptures and toward videos and installations. They have
left the formalism of their predecessors behind and developed
their own. And perhaps most pointedly, they have used their art
to explore some of the more urgent questions confronting those
who live in Lebanon today, questions concerning history,
identity, memory, amnesia, trauma, hysteria, the ways in which
wars and conflicts have shaped lived experience and the
precarious nature of individuality, citizenship, the life of the
mind and an imagined community of peers (linked by social and
intellectual though rather than patronage or fealty) in a weak,
sectarian state that is, in many ways, a crucible for the
region’s intractable political issues.
When walking through the spaces that comprise “Art Now in
Lebanon,” it is tempting to take note of the bombed-out
buildings, the stray bullets, armored tanks and buried mortar
casings, and to conclude that the objects in the exhibition are
all implements of war. So they seem. But the show’s most
successful twist is that it both reinforces and unravels the
notion that contemporary art practice in Lebanon is obsessed
with political conflict.
Some may criticize the exhibition for being fraught with
politics at the expense of aesthetics, where every artwork boils
down to reportage or a sociological study of war, be it
Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war, the summer 2006 war or the
untold stretches of so-called “cold” civil war that have
intermittently collapsed or paralyzed the Lebanese state and
welcomed foreign meddling everywhere in between and since. Some
may say this art is tough and offers little visual succor.
The poster advertising the exhibition certainly bolsters that
view, with the title of the show writ large across a detail from
Akram Zaatari’s photograph Saida, June 6th 1982, which frames
six explosions on a scrappy hillside above Lebanon’s second
largest city.
But Zaatari’s work is in fact a clever digital composite. These
six particular explosions, which eerily mirror the white clouds
in the blue sky above, did not occur simultaneously. Rather, the
artist pieced them together from photographs he took with his
father’s Kiev camera when he was sixteen. The image does not
represent reality but rather reconstitutes a teenager’s desire
to capture what he remembers calling “real fireworks.” Zaatari’s
photograph does not dutifully report facts. Instead, it
condenses those facts into a fiction that is intimately,
emotionally tied to his first memory of making images.
Likewise, Paola Yacoub’s high-contrast black-and-white
photographs of buildings scarred by shelling and sniper-fire,
from the series “Summer 88,” relate to a time when she ran
around Beirut with a photojournalist and former boyfriend. More
so than the horror of war, her images document the stomping
ground of young lovers who were feeling for the edges of
artistic competition and romantic impulse.
Mazen Kerbaj’s diary-like drawings, uproarious and tender at
once, epitomize how life goes on during times of war, how
newspaper headlines and 24-hour news feeds so often get it
wrong, and how the consequences of political violence stretch
far beyond the numbers of dead or wounded to include the
collective disillusionment of an entire generation, the one, of
course, to which the artist belongs.
An interesting counterbalance to the frustration of Kerbaj’s
drawings is Ziad Antar’s series of photographs produced for a
workshop in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. Each image is a
portrait, in a sense, of a scarf arranged into an elaborate soft
sculpture. The girls participating in the workshop, which Antar
led with the writer and curator Rasha Salti, would arrange their
veils on a white sheet and then leave the room. Antar would then
enter and document their creations. In the context of an
educational exchange meant to foster critical thinking and
artistic expression, the images capture the creative sparks that
fire when youngsters take hold of the tools of
self-representation. The artist’s role is minimal here. The
substance of each photograph is the color, pattern and
manipulation of each scarf.
As the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury once said: “The victorious
write history and the defeated stories.” If one scratches
beneath the surface of the works included in “Art Now in
Lebanon,” or if one lingers before them long enough to engage
the many critical strategies at stake, one finds that what
appear on the surface to be straightforward symptoms of trauma
eventually yield additional layers of meaning and material
underneath.
Perhaps because no one has ever been victorious in Lebanon’s
wars – despite many competing claims to the contrary, everyone
has been defeated in one way or another – the country’s
contemporary cultural producers (including writers and
filmmakers as well as visual artists) tend to concern themselves
most with dismantling the mechanisms by which history is
written, and with reconfiguring stories that are born of lived
experience instead.
The objects in “Art Now in Lebanon” may tell of war, or, more
productively, they may function as narrative triggers that lead
somewhere else entirely. As mnemonic devices, they may be
tethered to painful memories, but they also fire the imagination
with stories that are intensely literary, ranging from the
fabulist to the fantastic and shot through with dark humor and
delicate poignancy.
Walid Raad’s video I Only With That I Could Weep, from the
artist’s work under the Atlas Group’s name, introduces Operator
#17, a former Lebanese intelligence agent, completely fictional,
who was supposed to record suspicious activity along Beirut’s
seaside corniche but got distracted, day after day, by a deep
orange sun dunking down into the Mediterranean at dusk. Raad’s
photograph Scratching On Things I Could Disavow, Part 2,
features stray bullets the artist collected in 1989. More so
than remnants of war, these objects are records of
relationships, acquired as gifts from old girlfriends or trades
with his sister.
Rabih Mroué’s powerful, two-screen video installation I, the
Undersigned, draws on the story of a former militiaman who made
a public apology for his actions during the civil war, albeit
twelve years after the conflict came to a close. Nobody took the
apology seriously, notes Mroué in the wall text next to the
work. The installation juxtaposes the artist’s nearly catatonic
face, filmed in slow motion, and the text of an imagined letter
that is neither apology nor confession but a biting condemnation
of amnesty and amnesia, and an uproarious critique of art and
language.
Walid Sadek’s Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse, an
installation made from a stack of texts on a platform with a
tiny pencil drawing hung high on the wall above, strings
together the story of a family funeral, Sigmund Freud’s Mourning
and Melancholia and an account of a statue retired from its
pedestal in Downtown Beirut. The piece also links up to another
story – which is absent from the exhibition but present in this
catalogue – about Kozo Okamato, a curious, entirely real and all
but forgotten figure from the days when the Japanese Red Army
teamed up with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
for operations against Israel, and the only person ever granted
political asylum in Lebanon.
Lamia Joreige’s evocative photographs from the 2007 series
entitled “The End Of” are, in fact, images from Super-8 film and
video that appear to have been corroded by chemical agents or
the passage of time. Joreige describes these works as “mental
images,” as “reminiscences of a history” and a reflection on
“violence, loss and disillusion.” “They are not … beautiful
landscapes,” she writes in an accompanying text, “but carry
within them … all the tensions, conflicts and political turmoil
I/we experience.” The images deal with the elision of memory and
the stunting of narrative possibilities. There are no complete
stories in Joreige’s series.
Other works in the exhibition that do not narrate specific
accounts delve instead into strange phenomena, such as the
photographs of Khiam by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige,
which capture the cycles of destruction and memorial on the site
of Israel’s notorious former detention center in South Lebanon.
After the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Khiam was turned into a
museum. Then it was destroyed by Israel in the summer of 2006.
Then anonymous billboards appeared on the site, carrying images
of the center when it was a prison. This historical confusion
and collapsing of time into the instant, which Hadjithomas and
Joreige capture in each photograph, is symptomatic not only of
Lebanon’s experience but anyplace where history is revised and
rewritten after episodes of contention and strife.
What is intriguing – and rare – about “Art Now in Lebanon” is
the subtle emphasis on the form and diffusion of artworks in
addition to their content. Walid Sadek’s pamphlets and Akram
Zaatari’s posters are part of another trajectory – less visible
than videos and installations based on documents and archives –
that has been operative in Beirut’s contemporary art scene in
the mid 1990s, involving small texts that circulate with ease,
cost very little to produce, and move freely beyond the
commercial parameters of the art world, public institutions or
the gallery system.
Jalal Toufic’s Minor Art: Conceptual Posters and Book Covers is
a work in progress that began in 2000. The series so far
includes 19 posters, two posthumous resumes and eight book
covers. Through the juxtaposition of images and words on each
“imagined” film poster or book cover, Toufic condenses the
thought process behind a critical essay and/or an exegesis on
existing or imaginary works in relation to current political,
social and cultural circumstances – the arguments, the
references, the research materials and the links made among a
variety of study materials to generate theory – into a flat,
two-dimensional form. The posters and book covers provide visual
cues to some of the major themes, theories and ideas explored in
Toufic’s many books, videos and installations. As such they
stake a claim for the keen visibility and nimble circulation of
those themes, theories and ideas, such as martyrdom, time and
untimely collaboration and death and the undead.
Randa Mirza’s photographs in the “Abandoned Rooms” series,
meanwhile, delve into the phenomenon of urban centers emptied
not only by destruction but also by reconstruction, economic
fluctuation and uneven development. The traces left behind on
the walls of Mirza’s abandoned rooms tell the secret histories
of lives long forgotten. Much like Tabet’s reflection on
always-packed suitcases, the compulsion to explore these
derelict spaces, be they mental or physical, is vital in a place
like Lebanon where remembrance is so often bulldozed by amnesia.
Tabet was born in 1983. He should have had no memory of Israeli
invasion. He was seven when Lebanon’s civil war came to a close.
Fossils reaches back into his childhood to what should have been
the limit of his memory – the experience of going to sleep every
night with a bag packed with bare necessities and placed at the
foot of his bed, ready to go in the event that escalating
hostilities would force he and his family to flee. Sadly, that
experience persists to this day, if not due to outright war than
because of economic and political stagnation.
As Andrée Sfeir-Semler described it on the eve of the war in
2006, Tabet’s piece explores the paradoxical relationship
between heaviness and lightness, the pain of living through war
and the need to be nimble and able to move. The placement of
each suitcase suggests at once an arrangement of graves in a
cemetery, a broken grid of urban buildings, and the division of
families thrust into exile. The material references the building
stock of Beirut itself.
Fossils, writes Tabet in his artist’s statement, “is a
reflection on erratic war scenarios as they become normalized.
Our infatuation with the idea of having to leave our homes at
any given moment during the civil war – and the fact that we had
to have our bags packed beforehand in case of emergencies – grew
to become [habit] … In a way, the concrete transforms the
suitcases into fossils or monuments that bear within them the
tragedy of a given instant. They become the object of studies
and act as reference points in the lives of a country.”
For fifteen years, artists in Beirut have probed and kneaded the
history and experience of Lebanon’s wars to create works that
are, by turns, critical, provocative, and poignant. The point is
not to make meaning of war, but rather to recovery the faculty
of meaning after its complete foreclosure.
The division of “Art Now in Lebanon” into the Blue House and the
Main Building is, in many ways, a fiction. The generational
split between the emerging and established artists is not as
strong as it seems. One could easily imagine an alternative
arrangement in which Tabet’s and Rechmaoui’s sculptures, or
Antar’s and Zaatari’s photographs, of Mirza and Yacoub’s series
would resonate well off of one another. But the jump amplifies
the extent to which the younger artists are somehow more
carefree, loose and emotive. Perhaps the careful, studious and
serious work of the artists who came before them has paid off.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Art critic and editor
March 2008
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