Selected Exhibitions

Artes Mundi 7 exhibition & prize

Artists: John Akomfrah, Neil Beloufa, Amy Franceschini /Future Farmers,  Lamia Joreige, Nástio Mosquito, Bedwyr Williams.

The shortlist for Artes Mundi 7 in 2016 brought together 6 international contemporary artists who directly engage with everyday life through their practice and who explore contemporary social issues across the globe.

The works in Artes Mundi 7 all come under the title Under-Writing Beirut. Like a palimpsest, this ongoing investigation incorporates various layers of time and existence, creating links between the vestiges that record places, previous realities and the fiction that reinvents them. Underwriting Beirut is split into two interconnected exhibitions across both Artes Mundi sites – National Museum Cardiff and Chapter.

Under-Writing Beirut—Mathaf (2013)

‘Mathaf’, the Arabic word for museum, is the first chapter and focuses on the area where I live in Beirut, known as Mathaf, home to the National Museum of Beirut, and located along what was once the Green Line, which divided east and west Beirut throughout the Lebanese Wars. During the wars, and despite preservation efforts made by the museum conservator to protect the collection (with concrete), the museum building was destroyed and part of its small yet impressive collection was severely damaged, looted, or lost.

Under-Writing Beirut—Mathaf responds to the impossibility I faced while attempting to access artefacts in the museum’s storage as well as its archives, and to the only objects made available from them—the damaged Good Shepherd mosaic and a photograph documenting it from the time of the wars, when a sniper made a hole in it to gain a strategic view onto the museum square. By re-enacting the sniper’s line of sight, the video 180 Degree Garden View puts us in a position to imagine what the sniper saw and whom he may have killed through the hole. Based on photographs and measurements of the sniper hole, Object of War, on the other hand, is the negative of that hole, cast as a concrete sculpture. Its initial impetus rests on the practice of the imprint as a trace of contact with a body or void.

Objects from the National Museum of Beirut is partly inspired by the inaccessibility of the museum’s stored collection. It dwells by default on the only part of it that is visible, the entirety of the display on December 15, 2012. By reproducing every caption identifying the objects on show, the work ironically and vainly attempts to represent the museum’s holdings in one image, uncovering the politics of historiography and questioning the museum as a foundation for national identity. The leather-bound book Objects Missing from the National Museum of Beirut emphasizes the secrecy surrounding objects that vanished from the museum and suggests an archive that may or may not have existed.

Haunted by an unresolved past, Views of Museum Square (shot from my window) and Museum Crossing suggest how the museum site, meant to represent national union, became a symbol of the country’s division and the backdrop for sectarian violence.

Under-Writing Beirut—Nahr (The River)
Multimedia Works (Video, drawings and video Installation)

‘Nahr’ (The River) is the second chapter of “Under-Writing Beirut”. In this ongoing project, I look back, from the present, at the sociological, political and economic history of specific locations in Beirut in order to understand and produce narratives that are meaningful today and insightful into the past.

‘Under-Writing Beirut — Nahr’ includes a video (4 min. 2013) and a series of drawings (2015-2018) entitled ‘The River’ as well as the three-channel video installation ‘After the River (16 min. 2016). It uncovers different facets of Beirut’s river and its surroundings, particularly the area named Jisr el Wati, where I cofounded the non-profit art space Beirut Art Center in 2009.

This area, originally filled with factories and warehouses, built in the 40s, 50s and 60’s, has, since the mid-70s, been a derelict piece of land as it is manifested in its rundown factories, train station, as well as in illegal practices such as prostitution and criminality. It was one of the few remaining unexploited spaces in the capital and has recently witnessed a rapid transformation into a place of interest for art practitioners and high-rise residential development. The river, a dry dumping ground most of the year, acts as a suspended space, allowing me to explore notions of borders and landscape and to reflect on the diverse migrant population that has historically settled along the its banks since 1915, as well as the current gentrification of some of these areas. While defining the eastern edge of the city, the river flowing weakly, both connects and separates Beirut and its suburbs, but as the city extends, this frontier becomes indeterminate. With the ambitious plans to rehabilitate the river, the ever-expanding city, and the influx of refugees and migrants, the future of the river is unknown, as is the coexistence of all the communities living there.

The drawings are based on various maps of Beirut. They depart from the topography of the river then grow organically to take abstract shapes, evoking flowers, bodily organs and cells. The short video is a single sequence shot filmed inside the dry river, combined to a voice over – a poetic account on exile and displacement. ‘After the river’, on the other hand, shows the river and its surroundings from various angles, in an attempt to create a multi-layered, sensorial geography of the place while reflecting on its social history and recent gentrification. The work features a former landowner, construction workers building high-rise edifices as well as Beirut Art Center’s janitor.