Le Merle

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?

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.

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.

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?

Also, there is Cinesoumoud, which emerged from a call filmmakers made during the Eighth Arab Film Festival in Paris in reaction to the Israeli aggression, a few days after the beginning of the war. ³ Its aim has been to collect short films and present them on its website and in special screenings around the world. Rasha is right: the production of digital video and the intensive use of web technology had an extremely important impact on the initial artistic output during the war this last summer, for two main reasons: first, because digital video and internet resources became the easiest, most costeffective, and quickest way to raise consciousness of people in and outside Lebanon of the impact of the situation; second, there was a pressing need to document and create visual archives of what was actually happening from a more personal perspective than what the mass media provided. Artists felt the urgency of expressing themselves, and the internet immediately became the most effective way to share their work via blogs and various websites.

This turn toward the internet as an independent site for media distribution suggests a struggle over representation—what Cinemayat describes on its website as the Lebanese “reclaiming their own representation.” It seems that Lebanese artists have turned to new media, online videos and photographs, blogs, and so on as a means to articulate forms of experience that aren’t other wise acknowledged by politicians or journalists, to counter the representations of the international mass media.

But is it possible to reclaim one’s representation, when representation is so unstable, appropriable, and easily swayed into fictional constructs? Isn’t this precisely what much Lebanese art is known for: creating representations where the evidentiary mode of photography or video becomes indissociable from imaginary scenarios, as in the docu-fictions of Walid Raad or Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige? Might the struggle for ownership of one’s representation not fall into the trap of a false freedom, which is what the sophistication of many Lebanese practices otherwise avoids?

Most of the short movies that have been released by Cinesoumoud were extremely important at the time, working against the representations of the war in the mainstream media and collecting testimonies and images, but they have a different function than other forms of practice, than work developed in a less dramatic and more normal situation—even though it’s difficult to speak of “normality” in Beirut. Otherwise, T. J., what you say is right.The most challenging Lebanese work has nothing to do with naturalism or realism, but rather with articulating a certain paradigm that confronts and deconstructs a complex reality and allows a subject to confront, understand, and react. In a text published a few years ago, for instance, Walid Sadek explained that no matter how good an artist was, there was no way to compete with the criminal speed of political images in Lebanon. ⁴

Can you provide some notable examples of artworks that deconstruct realism in provocative ways?

Can we talk more specifically about curatorial projects and exhibitions that have come out of the recent conflict?

One work in Nafas Beirut that I found particularly striking (one that also circulated widely on the web) was Mazen Kerbaj’s sound piece, Starry Night (2006), which was basically a “duet” for trumpet played with and against a background of explosions from the Israeli Air Force’s bombing campaign in Lebanon. The trumpet’s hissing squeaks and breathy noises seemed to be as much an attempt to reclaim a sense of agency in a completely disempowered situation as a recognition of the futility of such a gesture. The trumpet is unable to find its voice.

I was initially keen on producing works by young artists who are in early stages of their careers, and this project originally had nothing to do with the recent political crisis, although the eruption of war has changed the plans of some participants, and ours too. It allowed us to consider the ways we could facilitate the production of artworks when a whole city was almost falling apart. Ashkal Alwan sent an artists’ appeal to raise funds for video productions. The incredible response to the call allowed us to widen the scope of the project, and it meant being able to produce and coproduce works by both young artists and more established ones. We hoped that by widening the scope we would be able to document the war as we saw it. There was at first no specific theme; the invasion imposed one on us, and the project became an opening for artists who had something to say.

What about the next Home Works?

Will it have a theme? How will it be conceptualized?

But rather than conclude glibly that war is good for art (as it is apparently for business), or that peace leads to cultural paralysis, isn’t it important to acknowledge that the very idea of peace and prosperity is itself a fiction? Because culture, at least any that I’ve known, is itself constituted socially, politically, economically by antagonism and conflict—think of the argument of Chantal Mouffe, for whom social and political disagreement forms the very basis of democracy. Not that we shouldn’t always strive for peace.

Absolutely—the world is engulfed in conflict. I’m reminded of Balibar’s warning about the increasing dangers of European apartheid resulting from the growing influx of immigrants without EU political rights, or Agamben identifying a state of exception that is now the rule, with the prospect of a permanent suspension of civil rights in response to an “infinite” war on terror, or Mike Davis on the Planet of Slums, or the new world order of “military neoliberalism,” analyzed by the San Francisco-based collective Retort. It is telling that such political theorization dominates our present. The question—as ever—is what role might art play within all of this. Rasha, how might curators in Lebanon mobilize the newly configured and politicized audience you mentioned earlier?

Is the present struggle with media representations the legacy of orientalism, what Edward Said analyzed as the Western-produced system of stereotypical representations of Arab cultures within the sciences and humanities, which served the larger project of colonialism? Do you think that today part of the stakes of Middle Eastern artistic practice is to analyze, stop, and reverse these projections?

I would say yes and no, because I think in a way it’s more complicated than that. The so-called Orient was also projecting its own images onto the West, although of course the power relationship was asymmetrical. The deconstructive (or anti-orientalist) discourse also tends to reproduce a certain number of received ideas of “the Orient,” “reinventing” it rather perversely. (In that sense the work of Peter Gran—Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840, published in 1979, a year after Said’s Orientalism—is radical because it shows that if the concept of the “Orient” is rejected, then so is the philosophy of Hegel as well.) I am more interested in the circulation of critical readings of images that negotiate different spaces or just clash.

Do you find Said’s analysis obsolete or outmoded?

When Edward Said was researching and writing Orientalism (the second half of the 1970s), much of what shapes the world today was not yet discernible: the restructuring of global capital and free trade, the drastic shifts in the conditions and sites of economic production, the quasiextermination of social wages (and Keynesian models), the near-total marginalization of unions and their political institutions and expressions, and the consolidation of the hegemony of global media networks. Many argue, and rightly so, that the neoliberal turn was initiated under the mandate of Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan, but its implications were not quite fathomable then. While one of the narratives of this present American empire—the blood-drenched “clash of civilizations”—seems to have been scripted right out of Orientalism (and Said’s Culture and Imperialism), I would still argue that we need to revisit the notion of postcolonialism critically or find a new term. We are living a historical moment when colonizing nations such as the United States and Israel, both heralded as morally grounded paragons of democracy and freedom, have become so morally and ideologically bankrupt that they physically resort to building walls to close off their territories, justifying it with (European) medieval parlance? the “Axis of Evil.” I defend a third position, where the United States and Israel are held accountable for their crimes, and the Syrian regime for its criminal involvement in the Lebanese civil war and postwar (and for its crimes against its own people), and the Iranian regime for its involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq (and for its crimes against its own people). To answer your question, I don’t think we ought to stop, analyze, and reverse projections anymore. Can you reverse fascist discourse? Religious fanaticism? We ought to create our own imaginary, vocabulary, and representations. The world is captive (as is Lebanon) to intellectually stunted and debilitating binaries: “good” versus “evil,” “enduring freedom” versus “Islamofascism.” I refuse to be caught on the slippery slope between these stark Manichean oppositions. More so than Orientalism, it is the set of lectures on humanism that Said delivered in the last few years before he died that I find inspiring nowadays. Furthermore, I have been thinking more and more about what it means to bear witness continuously to war and tragedy. I watch Israel’s demented military campaign in Gaza or the dementia of sectarian strife in Iraq, I am no more than a bystander. Even during the Israeli war in Lebanon this past summer I was essentially a bystander. It is first and foremost a psychologically and emotionally draining position, one filled with ineptitude and powerlessness. How can we turn it around? That’s what I would like to reverse. How can being a bystander transform its negative force into a positive, generative force?

Can we talk about Catherine’s project, Contemporary Arab Representations? She’s put an extraordinary amount of energy into drawing art from the Middle East into a critical, generative discourse, beginning with Beirut, moving on to Cairo, and then Iraq. ⁸ Is this not an example of an attempt to create a positive, generative force? Catherine, what’s the current state of the project?

It’s important to point out that Catherine is different from the frenzy of all these curators who fly in and out of Beirut. She knows the Lebanese scene well and researched it thoroughly. She created a personal relationship to the city. We can definitely question Contemporary Arab Representations, but it is also fair to emphasize the fact that Catherine has opened many doors for some Lebanese artists.

What would it mean today to question her project?