Contemporary Art Beirut

• the culture of Beirut has evolved under the influence of many different civilizations, such as the greeks, romans, arabs, ottoman turks, and french. the ruins of downtown Beirut have been found to contain seven civilizations Much of the urban planning is super-imposed on top of each other; whereas,other cultures (cities), while advancing from one civilization to another, either builds upon, or erases and replaces its urban fabric by physically taking over the past.

Supported by a Performance Philosophy grant for interim conference events and mbracing the work of more than sixty participants from over fifteen different countries around the world, the event was the first performance art conference at the American University of Beirut (AUB),  and is one of the most significant collective explorations of performance studies in the region. The mixed programme of the workshop emphasized the integration of academic research with performance practice, movement workshops, film, and site-specific responses to the city, and welcomed disciplinary perspectives from a broad range of fields including: architecture, urban planning and design, geography, gender studies, literature, performance studies and fine art, amongst others. It was hosted by AUB, with events also taking place in multiple public spaces in the city.  On the Corniche, Beirut's coastal promenade, an engineer, a Syrian construction labourer, a sales employee from the U.S. and a young female artist build a squat wall of cardboard boxes. Sweatily churning cement to secure each level, the peculiar team call instructions to each other amid a noisy crowd of actors and onlookers.

né en 1941, est sans doute le cinéaste qui a connu, autant dans sa vie quotidienne que dans son oeuvre filmique, l'exil comme figure majeure et signifiante. Cette figure, bien plus qu'une simple thématique que d'autres cinéastes libanais traitent avec plus ou moins d'importance dans leurs films, hante le cinéaste et son oeuvre depuis de longues années. Notamment depuis que les multiples guerres du Liban, entre 1975 et 2009, aient contraint le cinéaste à des exils parfois forcés, d'autres fois volontaires. Un premier « exil » l'avait déjà poussé à quitter le Liban pour Bruxelles pour poursuivre des études de cinéma, à la fin des années 1960. A travers 2 documentaires et un long métrage, Alaouié raconte l'exil dans toutes ses formes. Dans Lettre d'un temps d'exil, documentaire produit en 1990 alors qu'il était encore exilé entre la France et la Belgique, il s'adresse au Liban qui vient d'achever sa guerre (1975 -1990) à travers des portraits de quelques uns de ses amis, exilés come lui en Europe. Dans A toi ou que tu sois, documentaire qui date de 2001, il s'adresse en forme de lettre ouverte à l'un des personnages de Lettre d'un temps d'exil, Karim, toujours en France, pour lui raconter son retour au Liban et ses impressions de Beyrouth. Il dresse la galerie d'une dizaine de portraits, des libanais qui « vivent la nuit » et qui sont en déphasage avec la réalité quotidienne du pays. En 2007, dans son longmétrage Khalass, il relate le parcours de deux anciens combattants qui n'arrivent pas à s'intégrer dans le Beyrouth de l'après-guerre, désillusionnés et désenchantés par ce que leur pays est devenu durant les années 2000. Ils décident tous les deux à la fin du film d'émigrer, chose qu'ils avaient jusque là refusé de faire.

An Open Call for Undergrad and Grad Students
Lead by Pelin Tan
Contact: Sasha Ussef, [email protected]
Time: 10:00 – 14:00 or 15:00 – 18:00, evenings

associate professor at the Architecture Faculty, Mardin Artuklu University, Mardin (Turkey), and the Sursock Museum in the framework of the exhibition Let’s Talk about the Weather
(http://www.sursock.museum/content/lets-talk-about-weather-art-and-ecology-time- crisis), curated by Nora Razian and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez.
Participation of the students: Students in humanities, arts, natural sciences, who engage with and research the topics of this summer school, are warmly invited to join this summer school. There will be nine students coming from Mardin’s Architecture Faculty. The sessions will be held in English. An active participation in discussions and bringing examples from one’s own research are kindly requested.
Themes: Infrastructure, Drone, Archive, Camp, Solidarity
Invited speakers:
Marwa Arsanios (artist, Beirut), Tony Chakar (artist, Beirut), Nadim Farajalla (professor at the AUB), Jessika Khazrik (artist, Beirut), Mansour Aziz (designer, Beirut), Fadi Mansour (architect), Namık Mackic (architect).
Sursock Museum, Beirut, in the framework of the exhibition Let’s Talk about the
Weather (13 July -17 October 2016)
Locations: Beirut (Sursock Museum, Mansion, Arab Image Foundation, Arab
Architecture Center), Tripoli, Chouf.
General description and concept:
This summer school is co-organised by Pelin Tan,
The summer school
will focus on the ongoing practices and discourse of critical urban ecology, urban and rural spaces of Beirut with comparison of other trans-local examples of different cities and geographies.

Rania Stephan's nine-minute video Le Pont (The Bridge) follows the movements of a tall, angular man moving through the southern suburbs of Beirut. The camera first catches sight of him copping attitude in the midst of a traffic jam. He steps off his scooter and waves a yellow Hezbollah flag for a clutch of gawking journalists. Swaggering, prancing, putting on an impromptu one-man show-he poses for a photographer who approaches and seems eager, in the vacuum of a war ended, for a more colorful, humorous shot of postwar posturing and the politics of display. The date is August 14, 2006, and a cessation of hostilities brokered by the United Nations has just come into effect in Lebanon, ending thirty-four days of Israeli bombardment and Hezbollah rocket fire. Efficiently erected and notably slick posters and billboards in the southern suburbs tell of a "divine victory." Meanwhile, on the edge of a smashed overpass, Stephan films a group of people, members of an independent association active on behalf of free and fair elections and citizens' rights, as they prepare to drape a symbolic banner patterned with Lebanon's national emblem, the cedar tree, over the broken bridge, the counterpoint to that divine victory being the restoration of the state. (Whether or not it was actually Hezbollah, in a brilliant bit of PR, that provided that banner remains the subject of some debate still.) The man with the Hezbollah flag soon arrives and slots himself into the action, much to the consternation of the group's members, who are uniformly waving Lebanese flags. After a momentary freakout-"Oh my God! He's Hezbollah"-they pull him aside and convince him to lay down his yellow for their red, white, and green. He complies and adopts their rather more uptight manner with hilarious panache, marching in place and shouting about Lebanon's sovereignty as if it were the best joke in his book. Noticing the filmmaker who has noticed him, he leans into Stephan's camera conspiratorially. "Abu Hadi," he whispers, using the familial for Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah. He repeats the name at ever-escalating volume. No Wishy-washy convert, he. The civil-society group throws up its collective hands. The man has had enough of the charade, too. He picks up his new flag, does a little dance, hops back on his scooter, and rides off with Lebanon's logo arced behind him like the tail of a male peacock on the move.

Artforum (March 2017): 216-21.
THREE YEARS AFTER the Islamic State's brutal offensive in Iraq, and with no end in sight to the civil war raging in Syria after six years of conflict, the future of the Middle East looks increasingly precarious. At the same time, the West has made a dramatic turn inward, with potentially disastrous consequences for its role in the international community. Now, when art's critical engagement and resistance are needed more acutely than ever, Artforum invited art historian Nasser Rabbat to reflect on two recent exhibitions in Beirut that offer a glimpse of a more cosmopolitan future—and of the role of art in confronting fundamentalism and fascism.

Last nights at the Holiday Inn


“It offers lingering visitors luxurious furnished apartments with a lovely sea view, right in the middle of the best hotels. Under the same roof, anyone who chooses to do so can live, indulge in business, exercise a profession, get supplies, eat, drink and enjoy himself. A dream come true. In grim contrast to its publicity brochures, Beirut's 26-floor Holiday Inn last week was more a nightmare than a dream come true.”(1)

On March 21, 1976, after heavy shelling that started at night, squadrons from the “Mourabitoun”, the “Lebanese Arab Army” and other organizations captured the Holiday Inn. The high-rise hotel had been occupied by the Phalange when combats started in the hotels district in October 1975. On the following day, Christian militiamen struggled to take back their former citadel. A desperate attempt that revealed to be unsuccessful.

For the Lebanese Left and their Palestinians allies, the assault was a victory over “isolationist” and “imperialist” forces. At the contrary, the defeated Phalanges considered the event as an act of heroism of their isolated defenders. Last, the residents of Ain el Mraysseh neighborhood rejoiced of the end of the deadly sniping from the tower’s top floors.

The Holiday Inn attack is a milestone in the narratives of the Lebanese War. From the time of happening, it has been subject to various and contradictory versions and generated tales that incorporated collective memory and trauma. Based on archive, testimonies and artistic and literary works, this presentation doesn’t pretend to offer the definitive truth. It rather apprehends a specific historical moment and its interpretations through oral, written and visual approaches. 

(1) Karsten Prager, "Beirut’s Agony Under the Guns of March", Time 107, no 14 (5 April 1976): 31.

Beirut, an immensely historically and culturally rich city, can be described as a city of birth,
destruction, and rebirth. Using comparative literature, I will be discussing how the works of
Zeina Abirached use words and images to describe the people, places, and events of the civil
war which occurred there in the 1970s and 80s. I will start by briefly describing each book. As
this review progresses, I will focus on the individual as well as universal human behavior
through graphic narration and storytelling. This is essential to the understanding of the totality
of the situation in the text. The question to be analysed is how she—as an author of comic
books—writes about the Mediterranean (in particular, Beirut) through the study of its
characters as well as their stories and origins.
Zeina Abirached was born in Beirut, in 1981, when the civil war had already begun; she was
already 10 years old by the time it ended in 1990, and her childhood memories were shaped by
living through its horrific events. Going on to study graphic arts and commercial design at the
Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), she was awarded the top prize at the International
Comic Book Festival in Beirut in 2002 for her first graphic novel Beyrouth-Catharsis. She
moved to Paris in 2004, where she attended the National School of Decorative Arts. From
among her illustrated books, I chose three: A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return,
I Remember Beirut, and Le piano oriental.

Today, the act of walking in cities is connected to our newly-acquired digital gestures - scrolling and swiping, fixing our gaze on-screen and occasionally looking up to check the environment surroundings. In post-internet cities, physical markers that characterise the urban fabric no longer guide us. Google Maps has fundamentally transformed our ways of navigating and communicating with urban environments. As Hito Steyerl has stated, “Our sense of spatial and temporal orientation has changed dramatically in recent years, prompted by new technologies of surveillance, tracking, and targeting. One of the symptoms of this transformation is the growing importance of aerial views: overviews, Google Map views, satellite views. We are growing increasingly accustomed to what used to be called a God’s-eye view.”. 

Be that as it may, a search for “abandoned houses in Beirut” via Google Earth’s God’s-eye view’s view would not return any results. Besides, Gregory Buchakjian wouldn’t opt for such a view, anyway. The artist prefers a horizontal perspective: a view from the inside, and the logic of direct observation. In his project,  “Abandoned Dwellings in Beirut,. Wars and Transformation of the Urban Space : 1860-2015,” he embraces the “elementary form of the experience of the city” - – walking in the streets and talking to people. The city in his project is real, pulsating with insecurity, myth, destruction, and reconstruction, and populated by people who can show you the way.

Urban comics both about Beirut and by artists active within it are particularly attendant to the fifteen years of violence that drastically reshaped this coastal city. Written and drawn in the context of post-war reconstruction, the urban comics studied in this chapter explore, with an especial self-reflexivity, the extent to which comics themselves might function as a form of infrastructure, recalibrating and even rebuilding more socially and spatially just city spaces in the neoliberal era.

This book chapter engages with those modern ruins for which no final decision on preservation, restoration, or demolitoin has been made. I argue that this uncertain status imbues the ruins with a significnce that has been overlooked in most of the academic literature on modern or contemporary ruins. The condition of possible impending demolition is important because it resonates with the precarization of life in the era of globalization. An analysis of ruins based on the concept of disposability complements studies that focus on memory and those that focus on materiality, with a perspective attentive to the forms of violence operative in the production and management of waste and derelicted space.
The case of contemporary Beirut is illustrative, because some of its civil-war-ruins are still standing amidst a frenzy of highly speculative real estate development and in an historical period punctuated by episodes of war, assassinations and street clashes. The discussions revolving around these ruins focus mostly on their significance as bearers of memory. Looking at artistic engagements with some of the city's most iconic ruins, I will argue that the fascination with these structures equally arises from the improbable reality that they are still standing as derelict giants in a violently transforming cityscape. This has become particularly meaningful, because the uncertainty of their fate has become interwoven with the uncertainty of the fate of Beirut itself.

Beirut, an immensely historically and culturally rich city, can be described as a city of birth, destruction, and rebirth. Using comparative literature, I will be discussing how the works of Zeina Abirached use words and images to describe the people, places, and events of the civil war which occurred there in the 1970s and 80s. I will start by briefly describing each book. As this review progresses, I will focus on the individual as well as universal human behavior through graphic narration and storytelling. This is essential to the understanding of the totality of the situation in the text. The question to be analysed is how she—as an author of comic books—writes about the Mediterranean (in particular, Beirut) through the study of its characters as well as their stories and origins. Zeina Abirached was born in Beirut, in 1981, when the civil war had already begun; she was already 10 years old by the time it ended in 1990, and her childhood memories were shaped by living through its horrific events. Going on to study graphic arts and commercial design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), she was awarded the top prize at the International Comic Book Festival in Beirut in 2002 for her first graphic novel Beyrouth-Catharsis. She moved to Paris in 2004, where she attended the National School of Decorative Arts. From among her illustrated books, I chose three: A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return, I Remember Beirut, and Le piano oriental.