Frieze Magazine | Archive | Remains of the Day
Remains of the Day
What a show in New York says about artistic freedom in
Lebanon
http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/remains-of-the-day/
About this article
Published on 15/12/11
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
In December, a tiny, intriguing exhibition organized by the
Beirut Art Center opened in New York as part of the New
Museum’s ongoing ‘Museum as Hub’ project. Titled ‘Due to
Unforeseen Events …’ the show revisits five incidents in
which art works produced in Lebanon at various points over
Rabih Mroué Cover, 2011
the last 30 years were altered, censored, damaged or
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destroyed after they were first exhibited.
The artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, for
example, agreed to cut a scene from their 2005 feature film,
A Perfect Day, after a woman who attended the Beirut
premiere complained that an image representing one of the
film’s fictional characters was in fact a photograph of her late
husband. (She was the man’s second wife; Hadjithomas and
Joreige had gained permission to use the image from his first
wife, not knowing he had remarried.) The artist Rabih Mroué
likewise agreed to drop a few lines of dialogue from his 2005
performance piece, Who’s Afraid of Representation, after a
state censor demanded to see the script and insisted that any
material deemed capable of offending public taste or
provoking sectarian strife be removed.
In these cases, the changes were relatively cosmetic.
Hadjithomas and Joreige only had to cut their film for
subsequent screenings in Lebanon, as the woman was fine
with her husband’s face appearing in the rest of the world.
Mroué skipped over the problematic lines during his next
performance on stage, but they remained in the translations
from Arabic to English, which were projected onto a screen
behind him. Not for nothing has Beirut’s contemporary art
scene become known for its players’ keen sense of adaptation
and improvisation.
In other cases, however, the artists had less room to
manoeuvre. A monumental public sculpture by Saloua
Raouda Choucair disappeared in 1983. A dead body was
discovered on the site of Ziad Abillama’s San Balech
installation in 1992. A gimmicky, deliberately gaudy statue by
Tony Chakar was destroyed on the final night of a public
space project in 1995. ‘Due to Unforeseen Events …’ unpacks
each of these stories in two parts – firstly, as documentation
and description of each of the original art works; secondly, as
the production of new works for which the artists reflect back
on everything that happened to them. Kirsten Scheid, who
teaches art history and anthropology at the American
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Frieze Magazine | Archive | Remains of the Day
http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_article/remains-of-the-day/
University of Beirut, is presenting the work of Raouda
Choucair, who is now 95 years old and no longer making art.
The Beirut Art Center opened three years ago in a former
furniture factory on the eastern edge of the city. The New
Museum project is its first exhibition abroad. For a young
institution that has absolutely no curatorial staff, the show is
surprisingly complex. It may look like a quick study of
censorship, but it is richer than that, delving into tricky
issues of artistic autonomy and intellectual sovereignty,
exploring the mechanisms by which a state and a society
accepts an object or an event as a work of art or not, and
peeling back the layers of distrust, rumour, suspicion and
myth that are endemic to Lebanon’s cultural and political life.
The show also mirrors a public mood. Outside of a few
heartfelt but miniscule protests against the entire edifice of
the sectarian system – a wobbly and indistinct target from
the start – Lebanon has seen none of the mass
demonstrations that have toppled or weakened regimes
elsewhere in the region. Some may argue that the country
had its revolutionary moment back in 2005, when street
protests preceded the withdrawal of Syrian troops from
Lebanese soil after almost 30 years of de facto occupation.
But the truth is that Lebanon is stuck in a debilitating kind of
limbo, and in the last year the contemporary art scene has
gone through a strange, corresponding lull, characterized on
the one hand by the wholesale export of interesting projects
to venues outside of the Arab world, and on the other by
serious bouts of retrospection.
‘Due to Unforeseen Events …’ is a curious, compact exercise
in historicizing the development of Beirut’s contemporary art
scene over three tumultuous decades. A foreign audience
may find this instructive but, at a certain point, it will be
necessary for a local audience, as volatile or disdainful or
indifferent as it may be, to confront these stories, and for
members of the public to consider their role in the unmaking
of these and other art works. The more globalized the art
world gets, the more tempting it is for artists to leave their
most intimate audiences behind. But the toughest crowd is
still a local one. It will be interesting to see what happens if
the Beirut Art Center ever brings this exhibition back home,
and begins to make good on the notion of art as a public
trust, as something that can be questioned and challenged,
but never demolished or denied.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
is a writer living in Beirut, Lebanon.
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