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Article Excerpt
The following roundtable conversation, conducted via e-mail during November 2006, assembles a group of curators to consider the stakes and conditions of the national and international exhibition of Beirut-based practices. The participants all bear hands-on experience working in Lebanon and enter into dialogue from unique perspectives: Sandra Dagher, who directed the gallery Espace SD for seven years, is developing a new nonprofit contemporary art space in Beirut and, with Saleh Barakat, is organizing the first Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007); Catherine David, artistic director of Documenta X, is the organizer of the long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations. Rasha Salti, an independent curator and freelance writer based in Beirut and New York, oversees New York's CinemaEast Film Festival; and Christine Tohme directs the Beirut-based Ashkal Alwan (Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts), which, among its many activities, organizes Home Works, a semiannual series of symposia and exhibitions inaugurated in 2002 and dedicated to Middle Eastern cultural practices.
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Since 1975, Lebanon has suffered through a decade and a half of civil war and encountered innumerable crippling setbacks--notabtly the devastating bombing campaign waged by Israel during summer 2006--on its path to a nevertheless startling, if ever-fragile postwar recovery. What becomes clear in the course of the following exchanges is that Beirut's artistic culture, despite the unfavorable odds, has struggled to fulfill its aspirations of creative expression, thoughtful commemoration, and intellectual rigor and honesty. Facilitated by a few ambitious curators and a handful of energetic institutions, cultural production in Beirut is ever vibrant and terribly relevant--no doubt because, as Dagher, David, Salti, and Tohme make clear, it proposes an arena in which the conflicts that beset the city can be addressed at the level of representation, as objects of critical analysis and creative experimentation. Distant though it may be geographically from European and American cultural capitals, Beirut nevertheless emerges here as fully central to the most pressing questions--political, aesthetic, ethical, institutional--that animate artistic and curatorial practices today.
--T. J. Demos
T.J. Demos: Beirut has undergone massive economic development and cultural growth since the 1990 signing of the Taif accords brought an end, if precarious, to fifteen years of civil war. With the Israeli military campaign during the summer of 2006, Lebanon has suffered destruction on a massive scale, throwing the country into a condition of crisis not seen for a decade and a half. Riven by sectarianism, its infrastructure massively degraded and class divisions starkly apparent, Lebanon is now precariously positioned between competing international pressures from Iran, Syria, the United States, and Israel, with no easy resolution in sight. Given this regression and the resulting political instability what is the situation of curatorial practice in Beirut today? What do you see as the current challenges and imperatives of curating art in Lebanon in this period of crisis?
Sandra Dagher: It is true that Lebanon has undergone both economic and cultural growth since 1990, but it has not been a stable evolution. The country has never enjoyed peace. Although the heavy fighting may have ended in 1990, during the past sixteen years Lebanon has lived through successive states of tension at different levels (Israeli and Syrian occupation, Israeli attacks, the assassination of political figures). Of course the Israeli military campaign last summer created even more tension. But the political insecurities and the sectarian divisions were already there and never resolved. So the question would be how to deal with art and curatorial practices in a country that lives in constant change and regular insecurity, where you often live in the present and can rarely anticipate the years to come. I don't think the events of last summer really changed the situation of curatorial practice--or it is too soon to see the changes. But I think the challenges and imperatives of curating art in Lebanon are to understand and follow the complex and unstable context we live in.
Christine Tohme: I agree: given the present situation, I don't think anything has changed; we've been living with the conflict for thirty-one years. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon is not something new, but an embedded part of Lebanese political life. I've been a curator working in Beirut for thirteen years, and I would never say that the conflict changed the way I function as a curator. It has always put me in a position to rethink my curatorial practice and to consider the meaning of art in the face of political turmoil and instability. Do we--should we--expect any answers from art? I'm not so sure. When you live in the Arab world, and in a city like Beirut specifically, you stop asking these questions. Conflict becomes a general state of mind, a way of life, like the Intifada in Palestine, with the curfew, the rationing. It's the same in Lebanon. Living and violence become one entity. For me this has been going on since 1975. I would have expected something new from politicians rather than the unquestioned continuation of the warlord mentality that drove the Lebanese civil war. Artistic practice, in my opinion, is helping many people in this city ask questions that are highly needed at this point, because politicians are completely immersed in safeguarding their own power.
Catherine David: One outcome that is very unfortunate, close to obscene, is that people in the United States are just now suddenly discovering works made more than fifteen years ago--just because a war brings international attention to Lebanon. In the face of that spectacle, we still have to be pragmatic and go on considering Lebanese artistic practices properly, seriously, not just as the current fashion. You could say that the Israeli invasion has radicalized people's positions. I think it's very sad, but it's proof that many artists were right all along--as I heard during many trips to Beirut--that the civil war was ongoing. The war isn't only the bombing; it also has to do with territorial war, ideological war. And this realization was apparent in many works, whether photography, video, or literature. The most interesting development, in my view, has been the production of works with an experimental and analytical dimension, which is unique and specific to the situation in Beirut.
Rasha Salti: I will cite two consequences of the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon that I deem pertinent to cultural production and curatorial practice in its immediate aftermath. First is the empowerment of civil society. From the first days of the Israeli army strike, a significant number of NGOs leapt to provide aid to people--numbering nearly a million (a little less than a third of the total population of the country)--fleeing from areas in south Lebanon exposed to shelling. By all accounts and from the start, the government's performance in distributing aid was at best mediocre, at worst bogged down by petty, internecine political disputes. The role of NGOs became central in bringing relief. Their efforts created new networks of collaboration and solidarity that ran across the divides of social and political segregation. For the first time in postwar Lebanon, countercultural, subversive, and marginal cultural production may find itself a wider, more sensitized, and strangely captive audience, opening new channels to a newly diversified audience.
The second consequence of the war has been the proliferation of digital video and web technology that document everyday life. Access to the internet allowed people to break from the isolation that siege and shelling enforce. Filmmakers, artists, photographers, journalists, relief workers, and everyday folk began to produce on their own terms images of the lived experience. Some produced short videos and streamed them on the web for a worldwide audience as an act of militancy to inspire solidarity with the plight of the Lebanese people. Others produced archives, because previous wars have left very scant and only "official" archives; others wanted to shape a representation of the military assault to contrast with the logic of newscasts; and others used video to give expression to their subjectivity. The end result is an impressive mass of videos of varying lengths that convey the diverse experiences of the war.
Demos: Could you point to some specific examples of digital video and web-based works created during the recent conflict that you feel are exemplary? Or could you identify some of the new sources of distribution?
Salti: I can cite a few: Cinemayat, Namleh At3a (which translates as "passing ant"), and Beirut DC, the independent collective of filmmakers. (1) Also, Ashkal Alwan--the Beirut-based nonprofit arts association--is currently producing close to twenty-seven videos for a show in April 2007. The activity has not quite stopped. Some films are still in various stages of production and postproduction, but they nonetheless provide for a body...
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