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Beirut
Lab: 1975(2020)
Exhibition Curated
by Juli Carson and Yassmeen Tukan
UC Irvine’s Universities Art
Galleries (UAG), October 5 –
December 14, 2019
Download
exhibition catalogue PDF
The subject of Beirut Lab:
1975(2020) – a film
installation – features
contemporary film essays
produced by artists living and
working in Beirut, a site
where time bends and curves,
as in a Gödel universe. Here,
as elsewhere, historical
events are what semioticians
call a “sliding signifier,” an
image-unit that floats between
the past, present and future,
then back again in one’s mind.
Counter-intuitively, Beirut is
also a city where particular
events function as a kind of
collective caesura – an
historical blank space –
within cultural consciousness. The
most prominent of these events
being the Lebanese Civil War,
1975-1991, which has (and
continues) to provoke
critically minded artists to
engage in a type of
hermeneutic aesthetics of past
moments in time. For instance,
artists of one generation, who
were in primary school in the
seventies, wrangle with screen
memories of that moment, which
can neither be completely
remembered nor forgotten.
Alternately, a younger
generation of artists attempts
to untangle that which they
never knew themselves but
which they have inherited as a
gap in Lebanon’s state
sanctioned national history.
But, already, this
generational schema is a bit
too tidy. For there are those
artists in the region whose
artwork critically investigate
the more general question of
memory, history and,
therefore, temporality, by
subtending the perspectival
positions of the
aforementioned generational
lines. The film essays
featured in Beirut Lab:
1975(2020), showcase all three
such perspectives.
Films by: Basma Alsharif,
Panos Aprahamian, Mohamed
Berro, Gregory Buchakjian and
Valerie Cachard, Ali Cherri,
Toni Geitani, Daniele Genadry,
Amer Ghandour, Ahmad Ghossein,
Ghassan Halwani, Mustapha
Jundi, Nadim Mishlawi, Heather
O'Brien, Raed and Rania Rafei,
Walid Sadek, Ghassan Salhab,
Mohamed Soueid, Rania Stephan,
and Jalal Toufic.
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