Ashkal Alwan’s (The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts) fourth edition of »Home Works«, an 18-monthly interdisciplinary event featuring lectures, panels, exhibitions, film and video screenings, and publications, has habitually been organized within a schedule of disruptions, due to regional political circumstances. Indeed, its last two editions, in October 2003 and November 2005, were each held with a six-month delay due to the outbreak of the war in Iraq and the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Harri. According to its organizers it is precisely this paradoxical routine that drives them to break and shift relevant questions about dislocation and disruption. Wedged between the political debris of the 2006 July war with Israel, and the ensuing sectarian violence that would envelop Lebanon two weeks after Home Works’ closure, the focus on disaster, catastrophe, recomposing desire and sex practices seemed almost a given. As many a »parachute curator« will admit: war is sexy, and it is perhaps precisely because of this logical, albeit somewhat predictable choice, to focus on the dynamics of Eros and Thanatos (read sex and violence), that on a conceptual and qualitative level things did not always quite come together.

It is important to stress that from its inception Home Works has offered a much-needed space of criticality and distribution of informal knowledge by fusing artistic practice with larger contextual factors. Self-reflective critique is unfortunately still oft lacking in the Middle East/Arab world, where the formal and institutionalized voices coming out of art academies or from the printed media are more often than not archaic, conservative-conformist, and have little to do with critical and contemporary discourse. In addition, »The Forum,« as its organizers like to call it, is a hub where established artists and cultural practitioners meet and rub shoulders with new and promising talent from the region, and beyond. Being unique of its kind, no wonder then that expectations are raised so high, and that the desire to cater to these expectations translates into an attempt to be all-encompassing, thereby losing the sharpness of focus. Eight days with a full program is just too long for retaining momentum and the audience’s attention span. By day five, festival fatigue sets in, and a regurgitation of issues becomes inevitable.

[b]Archive-Based Work[/b]
Whereas in previous editions the exhibitions somehow played second fiddle to the panels, lectures and performances, this year they were the strongest feature of the festival. The Home Works IV exhibition, curated by Ashkal Alwan’s director Christine Tohme and hosted in the prestigious Sfeir-Semler Gallery, combined new works by artists including Ziad Antar, Walid Sadek, Kamal Aljafari and Marwan Rechmaoui, with more well-known projects by Emily Jacir, Michael Rakowitz, and Vlatka Horvat & Tim Etchells. Stringing together the exhibition were themes of archiving, cataloguing history, and the reconstruction – if not deconstruction – of memory. These thematic strands are recurrent issues for many artists from the Middle East, especially for the Lebanese and Palestinians. Of particular note were Golden Lion Award winner, the Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir’s installation »Material for a Film« (2004-ongoing), and Lebanese Marwan Rechmaoui’s sculptural structure »Spectre« (2006/2008).

As an artist, Rechmaoui is mainly interested in urban/rural dynamics and demographic transformations in urban space. »Spectre« is a 420cm x 225cm x 80cm grout and aluminum replica of a 45-year-old building the artist used to live in. Obsessively reproducing every minute detail, and traces its inhabitants have left behind, »Spectre« is not a dollhouse copy of reality. Rather, stripped of human presence, this architectural skeletal structure resembles many of the buildings gutted by civil war that scar Beirut’s cityscape, and which force the viewer to construct his own narrative of meaning and history. This desire to tell – yet ultimately not really reveal or derive an absolute meaning – lies at the core of Emily Jacir’s ongoing project »Material for a Film.« Jacir’s project comes close to being an homage to Wael Zuaiter, the Palestinian author, translator and activist, who was assassinated by Israeli Mossad agents on his doorstep in Rome on October 16, 1972, as a reprisal for the Munich Olympic killings. Zuaiter’s murder marked the beginning of a cycle of assassinations of Palestinian intellectuals, writers and artists by the Mossad. And though Jacir meticulously documents Zuaiter’s belongings – from a coin found, his collection of books, postcards he sent, audio and film recordings, family photographs, the copy of 1001 and One Nights he was carrying at the time of his murder, to the video interviews she made with his partner, artist Janet Venn-Brown – the material surpasses its subject matter. Not only is Jacir commemorating an important Palestinian figure, but – as a Palestinian artist – she is effectively reclaiming an artistic history and legacy that has been brutally smothered. The »dead« objects and media stand testimony to this. Someone who unfortunately did not manage to surpass his own subject matter was Lebanese artist and theorist Jalal Toufic with his series of film posters, film stills of his own art videos and his own book covers, in the project »Minor Art: Conceptual Posters and Book Covers.« Seldom have I encountered such a self-absorbed and unimaginative iteration of artistic practice. Minor art indeed.

Young Lebanese artist Ziad Antar offered comic relief with his two videos »La Marche Turque« (2006) and »La Corde« (2007). In the former we see a pair of hands playing Mozart’s Turkish March on a sound-muted electric piano; all we hear is the rhythmic thumping of the keys. In the latter a young man is rope skipping. At first his movements are simple, but as they grow bolder and more complex, every time he gets entangled in the rope, he sheds a piece of clothing: a kind of rope skipping strip poker. Both exercises somehow seem futile: music without sound, an endless loop of unsuccessful skipping experiments. But it is exactly the absurdity of these failed efforts without objective that makes Antar’s pieces such enthralling and playful comments on the Lebanese contemporary condition.

A.U.B. graphic design professor Zeina Maasri takes issue with the above in her exhibition »Signs of Conflict: Political Posters of Lebanon’s Civil War (1975-1990),« which showcased over 300 posters from more than 30 political factions. Maasri had been collecting and researching the posters since 2003. The title is well-chosen: not only does Maasri perform an archaeology of a gloomy visual cultural heritage and iconography, but she also by corollary reconstructs Lebanon’s untold history of propaganda and political manipulation in an open and critical way. A publication is planned by I.B. Tauris later in 2008, as well as a publicly accessible online database (2009). Though slightly didactically organized in format, the exhibition managed very well to display the plurality of political discourses and visual languages.

[b]Forms of critique[/b]
The program of panels, lectures and debates would have done well to heed Maasri’s call for plurality, and to pay more attention to different kinds of representation and conceptual languages. Indeed, this section of the festival was the most flawed. Whether due to clumsy translation, the lack of preparation or hasty curatorial strategy, most panelists seemed to be at a loss as to whom they were actually talking to and to what end. A session on suicide bombers seemed awkward – if not far-fetched – within this particular artistic/cultural setting. It was unclear what the organizers and speakers were trying to prove. There was little analysis and elaboration, except for Lebanese playwright Rabih Mroué’s contribution on a performance project. Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish’s lecture on »The Sexualized Image of Israel in the Arab Imaginary« was one many people had looked forward to, but disappointed hugely. Whilst projecting cartoons of the Handala figure, by famous Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, Darwish resorted to platitudes on power relations, but did not once actually analyze a (sexualized) image, not even those of al-Ali. To make matters worse, the usually brilliant artist and architect Tony Chakar offered a medley of previous talks and essays, while spewing his thinly veiled venom in the direction of Hizbullah. These types of strategies are an instrumentalization of a public platform, and prove once again that everything in Lebanon – even its art festivals – cannot escape political coloring. Perhaps this display of verbal violence was an omen of the crisis that would envelop Lebanon two weeks later.

Three artist talks stood out: Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who also exhibited his »The Invisible Enemy Does Not Exist« at the Sfeir-Semler Gallery (previously shown at the Sharjah Biennial 2007, and the Istanbul Biennial 2007), Egyptian audio-visual artist Hassan Khan, and the Bethlehem-based Italian architect Alessandro Petti. The contrast between Rakowitz and Khan was striking: in terms of content as well as presentation. While Rakowitz held an articulate and friendly presentation,¹ grounding his practice within social engagement and community interest, Khan treated the audience to a very dense and controlled lecture-performance titled »I am not what I am« – timed to the second. His point of departure, while zapping us through a plethora of projects, was that he is not interested in artistic practice that speaks to the artist’s conviction, bur rather hopes by refusing critique to come to an understanding of a particular material condition. That position by itself is of course a form of critique.

In the screening program it is worthwhile to mention the shorts by Turkish artists Ahmet Ogüt and Emre Hüner. Yet in this section of the festival many videos, especially by the Lebanese artists, had featured widely in programs previously organized by Ashkal Alwan, such as for example the Video Avril program (April 2007).

While the Lebanese political class is pondering how to reinvent – or maintain the status quo – of an outdated political system, so should Home Works perhaps also seek to re-visit its own practice in a time when doing one’s homework »repetitively and in solitude,«² is not enough anymore.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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