Labyrinth
"Labyrinth" by Salah Saouli
November 16, 1999

The "Labyrinth" by Salah Saouli is composed of a variety of transparent panels that, hanging in different angles from the ceiling, become carriers of separate images. These sheets are printed with fragmented and mutually overlapping texts, city maps, drawings, owned or collected photographs - a material that transforms itself into an open system of images offering continuously new visions and interpretations to the visitors, as they enter the iconographical labyrinth and wander on its pathways.

"Mauerschall" 1996
Mixed media on Plexiglass
350x350x400 cm

"Obsession II" 1996
PVC, oil and neon
90x140X12 cm
 

However, the multitude of images does have a common denominator: Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where Salah Sawli was born in 1962 and where he studied at the local Academy until 1984. As a metaphorical starting point for his installation, Sawli uses the labyrinth structure of the old harbour city as well as its turbulent history. Its rise to a booming culture and economic centre, its decline following the civil war that culminated in the division and subsequent destruction of the metropolis and the killing and exodus of so many of its inhabitants.

All this appears, almost always without name and indication, like internal images of the memory: a visual warehouse with a centre and peripheries that suddenly looses its form again. Since Salah Sawli gives space and surface to those events, which are only brought about by the movement of the visitor, the borders between individual perception and collective recognition, between past and present, get into motion.

Salah Saouli

Born in Beirut in 1962