Bank Street
Part 4 of the photo tour of Sharjah Biennial 11: Re:emerge. Towards a New Cultural Cartography, 13 March - 13 May 2013. Curator: Yuko Hasegawa. More than 100 participants.
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Under-Writing Beirut - Mathaf. 2013
Mixed-media installation
Under-Writing Beirut looks at historically and personally significant locations within Beirut’s present. Like a palimpsest, the project incorporates various layers of time and existence, creating links between the traces that record such places’ previous realities and the fictions that reinvent them. Mathaf, the Arabic word for museum, is the first chapter of an ongoing project, and focuses on the artist’s neighbourhood in Beirut.
The area, known as Mathaf, is home to the National Museum of Beirut, which opened in 1942. The museum is located along what was once the Green Line, which divided East and West Beirut throughout the Lebanese Wars (1975–1991). During the wars, and despite preservation efforts made by the museum conservator, the museum’s building was destroyed and part of its small yet impressive collection was severely damaged, looted, or lost.
Under-Writing Beirut - Mathaf responds to the impossibility faced by the artist while attempting to access artefacts in the museum’s storage as well as its archives, and to the only objects made available from them - the damaged ‘Good Shepherd Mosaic’ and a photograph documenting it from the time of the wars, when a sniper made a hole in it to have a strategic view of the museum square.
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.
See also:
Lamia Joreige: Under-Writing Beirut – Mathaf
Article in: Nafas Art Magazine, 2013
© Photo: Haupt & Binder
© Text: SB11 Guidebook
Part 4 of the photo tour of Sharjah Biennial 11: Re:emerge. Towards a New Cultural Cartography, 13 March - 13 May 2013. Curator: Yuko Hasegawa. More than 100 participants.