Catherine David calls the Lebanon of the decade following the civil war a laboratory: a laboratory with a city at its centre. Beirut's contradictory social reality and its phenomenological complexity, she claims, cannot but provoke reaction from intellectuals and artists. In her opinion, no conventional explanations provided by present-day theory and reflection can come to grips with this city's actuality.

Under the title »Contemporary Arab Representations«¹, David has now put together a project series that explores, among other things, approaches to understanding this second - along with Cairo - large capital of the Arab world.

Beirut, Lebanon: in the Arab world, the same political elites affirm technological and economic globalisation as in other local situations. However, its political success is based on the use of nationalistic, fundamentalist, culturally traditionalistic rhetoric. As if to cover up these obvious contradictions, a fine distinction is made in this political rhetoric between the positive achievements of technological modernity, and the supposedly negative ones of Western cultural modernism. After the end of the (civil) war in Lebanon, much of this double strategy has become customary at the public level: Beirut is being recreated very much according to the models of post-Fordian urban management. However, in its function as a role model for attempts at modernisation in other parts of the Arab world, a function it regained after the war, the city is especially at the mercy of the fundamentalising influences of Islamic concepts.

In the representations on display, at least - David deliberately does not refer to the works as »art« -, many of the artists in post-war Beirut seem to be fighting to reclaim two modernities: one that is secularised, culturally determined and internationalist, and another in which is it is not already ideologically suspect to uphold local traditions and maintain an objective, yet affirmative attitude to the legacy of Arab cultures. However, it seems that any identification with or reworking of local cultural traditions in art and writing is particularly fraught with problems.

Jalal Toufic's video »Ashura: This Blood Spilled in My Veins« (1996) is a documentation about ritual practices of bloodletting in Shi'ite culture. The ritual goes back to a massacre said to have been visited on the family of the son of the first Shi'ite Imam (and grandson of the Prophet): in other words, one of the founding myths of Shi'ism. Toufic's video transforms the ritual, abstracts its context. In this way, a striking pictorial essay is created about ways of remembering traumatic moments of collective historical experience - or the impossibility of remembrance outside these ritualised forms. Toufic also raises the question of whether it is possible to make reference to these traumatic situations outside schematisms of remembrance ordained by religion or the state and thus already »abstracted«. In this work, it is the question of heresy and deviance, of resistance, which emerges.

The works of Walid Sadek, who also lives in Beirut, are informed by similar intentions. In Barcelona, Sadek shows two different projects. »Al-Kazal« (»Laziness,« 2000) is a picture essay with poems in newspaper format by the political author Bilal Khbeiz. In it, Sadek takes a step sideways from the reality of the multi-conditioned body images in everyday Lebanese iconology, shifting to an elegy on bodies and subjects who enjoy themselves at leisure, intact and unproductive, dreaming unusable, unevaluable dreams: to body images of a modern Foucaultian subject still in a process of artistic formation.

Sadek's second work is an installation: with deliberate references to the displays of a Felix Gonzales-Torres, it revolves around the themes of presence and absence, of pain and loss. However, the give-away poster does not show pictures of clouds like the ones by Torres, but a male leg, hairy, direct and banal in its presence. Cardboard tubes are draped serially on the wall. The arrangement is entitled »The Others«. The obstacle, the foot exposed to view, also sublimely represents the still male, chauvinistic space of present-day Lebanese reality.

Walid Ra'ad's reconstruction work on a - fictive - story of the Lebanese civil wars (also see p. 36ff), Lebanon's difficult path to becoming a state, the failed identification associated with the concept of a Lebanese nation, the positive affirmation of Beirut as a possible substitute for it, as the model of a multimodernistic city, is presented in the form of an archive. In Barcelona, Ra'ad also shows a web site by the Atlas Group for the first time.

Tony Chakar also carries out reconstruction work: on everyday life in pre-war Beirut, and on the life of his father between the modern ages, which later mutated into the biography of a hero. Chakar shows (»4Cotton Underwearforlony«, 2001) how far fictional narrative strands work their way into critical histories and allow the creation of completely personal, vivid narratives.

As in their presentation in Villa Solitude in Stuttgart, Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre (Beirut/Paris, see p. 28f) deal with questions concerning the representability of a landscape's historical character, focusing on the south of Lebanon, the area on the border to Israel - an »abandoned« region, yet much marked by war. What is the possible language for such a photography? What is the visual evidence of this region and its architecture?

This is a question that Tony Chakar, together with Naji Assi and female students from the Art Academy, have also explored with their multivisions picture essay, a study in architectural and urban sociology. In this imagological analysis of the suburb of Rouwaysset, an area which is socially mixed, yet in danger of falling into poverty, the urban space appears as narrated space. The »Monument for the Living«, a post-war, modernistic skyscraper, once the highest building in Beirut, which was never completed, remaining a shell, and which departed from its originally planned function as a shopping mall to become a base for snipers and dungeon for hostages during the war, is also one of these fictionally altered spaces. Marwan Rechmaouis's work tells its story. In David's collection, these findings are expanded upon in a video lounge, where films by Khalil Hanoun, Mahmoud Hojeij, Ghassan Salhab, Mohammed Soueid and Akram Zaatari are screened.

Precisely the unspectacular, extractive nature of the presentation produced a picture that eloquently shows the representational conflicts of different power formations trying to gain a leading position in a re-found modern age - and thus also isolation, alienation and subjugation, as well as the difficulties in living out local modernity.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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