List of works

Naji Assi and Tony Chakar
Rouwaysset: A Modern Vernacular, 2000

A work carried out by Tony Chakar, Naji Assi and the students of the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in Rouwaysset, a city set in the northern outskirts of Beirut. A critical examination of the views centred on cities and their poorer suburbs - mainly the view which looks at these suburbs as an incomprehensible mass of chaos and irrationality. This process led to re-examining the ways in which these ideas are usually conveyed, in language and mass-produced images of course, but also, and more importantly, through the post-Renaissance architectural drawing, the logical consequence of perspective, or the illusion of 3 dimensional narrative space.

Tony Chakar
4 Cotton Underwear for Tony, 2001-2002

The exhibited work focuses on the failed attempts to reconstitute a deceased loved one in a city that lives in a perpetual present dominated by political views steeped in death and martyrdom.

Elias Khoury and Rabih Mroué
Three Posters, 2000

An actor, a resistance fighter and a politician seek their "last" images in front of a camera before heading towards their own death. Three Posters tries to debunk the concept of martyrdom within the context of the ideological disintegration of the Lebanese Communist Party (LCP).
Actors: Rabih Mroué, Georges Antoine Kerbaj and Lina Georges Saneh.

Walid Raad
Atlas Group Project

The Atlas Group is an imaginary research foundation that Walid Raad established in Beirut in 1999, to carry out research work and provide documents on the contemporary history of Lebanon. With its first project, The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, the foundation aims at locating, preserving, studying and assisting the production of audio, visual, literary and other artefacts likely to shed light on some of the unexamined aspects of the Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1991. In this endeavour, the Atlas Group has found and produced notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs, and other documents. The Atlas Group exhibits its artefacts and has produced works in community centres, festivals, galleries, museums, theatres, and schools. They also disseminate information about the group and present its works via The Loudest Muttering Is Over: Case Studies from The Atlas Group Archive.

Marwan Rechmaoui
A Monument for the Living, 2002

"A building located on the outskirts of the Central District Beirut. A landmark, being one of the tallest high-rise blocks in the city. Although the building was never completed, it was originally built as a commercial centre and eventually served as a jail during the Lebanese civil war. The cells where the hostages were held were on the lower levels and guarded by various militias - whichever was in control of the building at the time. Being a highly strategic point, the upper levels were used by snipers ... ten years after the cease-fire, the building is still dysfunctional due to structural defects."

Walid Sadek
Untitled, 2002

"I look into myself: a message - He is not here - stands alone where a body used to be before being substituted and which may now be dead and certainly inert. The spoken words stubbornly remark and establish an absence that refuses to melt away. The spoken words seem to require that the absent body be finally inhumed. Yet in the meantime, they - the spoken words - are here to present the absent, they are here instead of absence. I look into myself: a message - He is elsewhere - which leads me in turn to ask about other places and other bodies which I haunt. The absence which is marked in this place is also a multiplicity which haunts other places. The present, here - see here - a gap in itself, is represented elsewhere."

Jalal Toufic
"Ashura": This Blood Spilled in My Veins, 2002

"Al-Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the son of the first Shi‘ite imam, ‘Alî, was slaughtered alongside many members of his family in the desert in 680. This memory is torture to me. But, basically, one can say this memory is torture to me of every memory, since each reminiscence envelops at some level the memory of the origin of memory, what torture had to be inflicted on humans in order to make them remember (Nietzsche). The memory that the yearly commemoration of ’Âshûrâ’ is trying to maintain is not only or mainly that of the past, but the memory of the future, that of the promise of the parousia of the twelfth imam, the awaited Mahdî, notwithstanding the passage of a millennium since his occultation; as well as the corresponding promise of Duodeciman Shi‘ites to wait for him. ’Âshûrâ’: A Condition of Possibility of the Unconditional Promise."

Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre
Al Manazer [Aspects], 2001

Jointly produced with the Ayloul Festival.
"Three aspects of South Lebanon are presented in a synoptic table. A first aspect in relation to nature, with elegiac landscapes of South Lebanon; a second aspect also focused on nature, with National Geographic style landscapes; and a third aspect based on humankind and its language, with interviews we had with stretcher-bearers who worked throughout the war. We tried to draw the status of different territorial elements from their accounts. Through correlations established between these concepts, we follow the movements of territorial elements in today’s struggles and challenges."

List of works

Activities