Beirut, Beyrut, Beyrouth, Beyrout

Pipe Dreams, 2012
Two-channel video installation, 5 min. loop

In an historic phone call between the late Syrian President, Hafez El Assad, and the Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, we witness the “father of the nation” asking the “hero” about his impressions as he looks down on Syria. A conversation that features the eternal leader, who from the comforts of his office, casts a watchful eye over the children of the nation, even as they are thousands of miles away up in space. This is the end of the 1980s, when the young revolutionaries of the recent past, in Libya, in Iraq, in Egypt and in Syria, had made their grabs for power and asserted themselves as the sole and eternal leaders of their countries. Countries where power is fed by symbols: by statues of the founding father, larger-than-life photos, the leader’s orations, and of course, by heroes.

Twenty-five years later, in 2011, the beginning of the upheaval in Syria, the authorities, fearing vandalism, dismantled statues of Hafez El Assad. When power begins to lose its Monuments, it is the beginning of the end; the countdown has started and lift-off is imminent. Haunted by the image of statues destroyed, from Stalin to Saddam Hussein, the regime tried to head off the inevitable, sacrificing the Symbol in order to safeguard the Image.

This interface between two moments in recent Syrian history encapsulates the history of the entire region: the mechanisms of the construction and deconstruction of totalitarian power, the dreams and disillusions of an entire people.

Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut, Lebanon) is a video and visual artist based in Beirut and Paris. Cherri works in drawing, film, installation, performance, print and video, tracing correspondences between political and geological disasters in his native Lebanon and neighboring territories.
He is the recipient of Harvard University's Robert E. Fulton Fellowship (2016) and Rockefeller Foundation Award (2017). His films have been shown in international film festivals including New Directors/New Films MoMA NY; Cinéma du Réel, Centre Pompidou; CPH:DOX (winner of NewVision Award); Dubai International Film Festival (winner Best Director); VideoBrasil (Southern Panorama Award); Berlinale; Toronto International Film Festival & San Francisco International Film Festival amongst others.

The Last Cartographer in the Republic, 2017 
Video, 16 min.
Courtesy the artist and Marfa’ Gallery

Director of Photography: Ziad Chahoud, Mazen Hicham, Sound: Ramzi Madi, Editing: Rami Sabbagh Color grading: Chrystel Elias, Lucid, Sound mixing: Rana Eid, db Studios

Adeeb Khaled, the last cartographer, who drew most of the maps of Lebanon works in the archives of the Directorate of Geographical Affairs in the Lebanese Military. Ahmad Ghossein’s project questions the conceptions of space, land, and the limits of its depths before it can be considered ‘underground’ in Southern Lebanon. This part of the country has no official cadastral record and no information about it exists in the Directorate of Land Registration and Cadasters in Lebanon. Cadastral surveys were considered one of the foundational tools for ‘modernizing’ a country, registering and classifying the demarcations between public and private property, and did not only imply enabling the planning and implementation of modern infrastructure, but also organizing private property, and thus introducing a new “objective” or “scientific” ordering of social, economic and political relations. Ahmad Ghossein’s work looks into the implications of such missing data, investigating the states’ practices and processes in relation to cartography, geodesy, hypsometry, and other related sciences.

Draft Zero, I-III, 2017
Lightboxes, acetate sheet
38 x 53 cm each
Courtesy the artist and Marfa’ Gallery

Three attempts at giving a shape to the land on acetate plastic material which is no longer produced. The Cartographer Rafik Mourad, and Ghossein traced and etched their initial attempts at drawing a map of the Wadi al-Hujeir area, in southern Beirut. This map-making technique is out of practice today.

Ahmad Ghossein (b. 1981, Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist and filmmaker. He holds an MFA in Visual Art from the  National Academy of Art in Oslo (KHiO) and a BFA in Theater from the Lebanese University, Beirut.Ghossein's work has been exhibited in different museums and galleries and has been screened in various film festivals around the world including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and New Museum in New York, Sharjah Art Foundation, Center Pompidou in Paris, Oslo Kunstforening, Kunsthall Oslo, With Koro (Uro) in Oslo, Ashkal Alwan's Home Works in Beirut, SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, Nam June Paik Art Center in South Korea, MuCEM museum in Marseille, Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen, the Bétonsalon in Paris, the Haus am Waldsee art space in Berlin, Beirut Film Festival, Berlinale Film Festival, Dubai Film Festival, Tribeca Doha Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival, Ayam Beirut Al Cinema'iya, and the Fid Marseille Film Festival.

Kissing (“Dancing, Smoking, Kissing” series), 2013
Silk thread embroidery on embroidered silk cloth, 70 x 100 cm Courtesy the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens – Thessaloniki

With Imad Hamdi and his twin brother (“Dancing, Smoking, Kissing” series), 2013 Silk thread embroidery on embroidered silk cloth, 75 x 100 cm
Courtesy the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens, Thessaloniki

Raed smoking (“Dancing, Smoking, Kissing” series), 2013
Silk thread embroidery on embroidered silk cloth, 90 x 70 cm Courtesy the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens, Thessaloniki

Raed Yassin literally, and mechanically, reproduces the visual fabric of his childhood memories in a series of embroideries in Dancing, Smoking, Kissing. He takes the viewer on a pictorial walk down memory lane by threading together the mental images of his childhood with their lost photographic representations. We are all familiar with family photo albums and how they look and feel. They are universal, yet private, mementos that document sometimes big, but mostly small and mundane instances of family togetherness. Most of Yassin’s family photographs were lost over time through incessant moving, displacement, and in other ways. What remains of these lost images is not only the memory of the event (such as a birthday or dress-up party, a picnic at the beach, a kiss in a nightclub, a holiday abroad) but also the memory of the actual photographs that chronicled family life. Born into a family of tailors Yassin sets out to reconstruct these disappeared and abandoned images on computer-embroidered textiles that incorporate his own recollection, those of family members, and the leaps and gaps of his imagination. (Nat Muller)

Raed Yassin (b. 1979, Beirut, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut. He graduated from the Theatre Department of the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003, and in 2015 he was awarded a research fellowship at the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne.

One of the organisers of Irtijal Festival - Beirut's experimental contemporary music festival - Yassin has released several music albums and founded the production company Annihaya in 2009. He is also a founding member of Atfal Ahdath, a Beirut-based art collective.

He has exhibited and performed in numerous museums, festivals and venues, including Notingham contemporary (2017), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014), Kunsthalle Wien (2015), ICA London (2014), Gwangju Museum of Art (2014), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2014), Kalfayan Galleries, Athens (2011, 2014 & 2017), Boghossian Foundation - Villa Empain, Brussels (2013) and Delfina Foundation, London (residency 2014 & 2010 - 2011).

Mondo 107, 2001
Ten of twelve Inkjet prints (Archival inks and paper) 
Various sizes

In 1997, Lucien Samaha began his LoungeCore Party on the 107th Floor of the World Trade Center in New York City. What was supposed to be a summer run, ended four and half years later with the destruction of the Twin Towers on the fateful morning of 9/11.

As a prolific photographer, and from his DJ booth, Samaha extensively photographed the truly eclectic dancing crowd, which mixed businessmen from the financial district with young hipsters, locals and tourists of various nationalities.

Lucien Samaha (b. 1958, Beirut, Lebanon) has been photographing his life and adventures since he took one of the first photography courses ever offered in a High School in the US in 1975. Photography has been Samaha's companion throughout his many careers, including that of a Flight Attendant for TWA, a Marketing Manager for Eastman Kodak Company, (where he had the distinction of being the first digital photographer ever), and a world-famous DJ on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center.

Lucien is currently consolidating and annotating his archive of over a million photographs and video clips to serve a variety of projects, now and in the future. To date, Samaha has also self-published over 70 photography books of varying genres from street photography in different cities to esoteric themes found in his archive's categories.

The River, #7, 2016
Wax, pigments, graphite pencil, pastels & crayons on Velin d’Arche paper 
65 x 100 cm
Courtesy the artist Marfa’ Gallery

The River, #10, 2016
Wax, pigments, graphite pencil, pastels & crayons on Velin d’Arche paper 
65 x 100 cm
Courtesy the artist Marfa’ Gallery

The River, #8, 2016
Wax, pigments, graphite pencil, pastels & crayons on Velin d’Arche paper 
65 x 100 cm
Courtesy the artist Marfa’ Gallery

In her project «Under-Writing Beirut», Lamia Joreige investigates historically and personally significant locations in Beirut. 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.

Joreige’s series of drawings «The River» (2015-2017) are inspired from various maps of the river.

In «Under-Writing Beirut, Nahr» (The River), Lamia Joreige uncovers the different facets of Beirut’s river with its recent and rapid transformations, from dumping ground to a place scheduled for ambitious development. While defining the eastern edge of the city, the river now flowing weakly both connects and separates Beirut and its suburbs. The work invites reflection on the interwoven narratives of the river, its surroundings and the people who live and work around it, particularly the urban area named Jisr el Wati, in Beirut’s East.

Lamia Joreige (b. 1972, Beirut, Lebanon) is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Beirut. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting and filmmaking.

Joreige's artworks have been presented internationally in various exhibitions and venues, among which: Centre Pompidou and Musée Nicéphore Niépce (France); Harvard University's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the International Center of Photography, the New Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Taymour Grahne Gallery (US); Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery and Cardiff National Museum (UK); Sharjah Biennial (UAE) and Galerie Tanit and Art Factum (Lebanon).

She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the year 2016-2017 and was shortlisted for Artes Mundi 7, the United Kingdom's leading biennial art prize. She is a cofounder and board member of Beirut Art Center, which she codirected from 2009 to 2014.

Contemplating an Old Memory, 2017-2018
24-carat gold cast of a lentil seed, live lentil sprout of the same seed, iron rods, plates, water, 82 x 60 cm
Courtesy the artist and Marfa’ Gallery

A lentil seed is molded and cast in gold. The same original seed is then left to sprout and grow. The cast and the growing plant are exhibited side by side. The cast will be frozen in time by an imprint process, whilst the other lentil will sprout and grow over the course of the exhibition’s duration.

The work of Stéphanie Saadé develops a language of suggestion, playing with poetics and metaphor. She shares clues, signs, imageless and occasionally silent trails with us, which interact like the words of a single sentence. It is for the viewer to decipher them, as would an archaeologist faced with traces, fossils, and fragments. This enigmatic quality often stems from the artist’s own experience. With Stéphanie Saadé, the immaterial is actual matter, perpetuated by memory beyond the exhibition and the experiences it engenders.

Nostalgic Geography, 2013
Printed map from 1935, mirror stainless steel track, 83 x 83 cm Courtesy the artist and galerie Anne Barrault, Paris

A familiar trajectory, regularly undertaken by the artist when she lived in Paris, is transposed onto the map of Lebanon, where she now lives. The departure point in Paris – her former apartment – is used to determinate the departure point on the map of Lebanon – her current apartment. The direction and scale of the original trajectory is respected. A number of obstacles prevent the Parisian path to be crossed in Lebanon: it is interrupted by a river, buildings, or the absence of streets. By chance, the end point on the new map is located very close to the place where the artist lived as a child.

Elastic Distance, 2017
Program installed on the mobile phone in the show and the mobile phone of the artist
Courtesy the artist and Marfa’ Gallery
Thanks to Henri Asseily

On a mobile phone screen, an ever-changing number, corresponding to the distance between the artist and her work at Oslo Kunstforening is displayed.

Stéphanie Saadé (b. 1983, Lebanon) lives and works between Beirut and Paris. Saadé graduated in Fine Arts from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts, Paris, France and attended a post-graduate program at the China Academy of Arts, Hangzhou, China. She was an artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2014/2015), and the Cité Internationale des arts, Paris, France (2015).

Her work has been exhibited recently at Home Works 7, Beirut (LB) / MuHKA, Antwerp (BE) / La Traverse, Centre d'Art Contemporain d'Alfortville, Alfortville, (FR) / Marres, Maastricht (NL) / Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau (DE) / Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres (FR) / Counterspace, Zurich (CH) / Parc Saint Légerhors les murs, Nevers (FR) / Mosaic Rooms, London (UK) / Casa Árabe, Madrid and Cordoba (ES) / La Conservera, Murcia (ES) / Van Eyck, Maastricht (NL) / Le 59e Salon de Montrouge, Montrouge (FR) / Beirut Art Center, Beirut (LB) / Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut (LB) / A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah (PS) / Qalandyia International Biennial, Qalandyia (PS).

My Cloud, 2012
Digital print påacetat-ark 
8 ark, 62 × 62 cm hver

Mazen Kerbaj (f. 1975, Beirut, Libanon) er en tegneserieskaper, visuell kunstner og musiker. Han arbeider ogsåmed selektive illustrasjons- og designprosjekter og underviser deltid ved the American University of Beirut.

Kerbaj er forfatter av mer enn 15 bøker og hans noveller og tegninger er blitt publisert i antologier, aviser og magasiner. Hans arbeid er blitt oversatt til over ti språk. Hans maleri, tegning, video, live performance og installasjoner har blitt vist i solo- og gruppeutstillinger i gallerier, museum og kunstmesser verden over.

Kerbaj er vidt anerkjent som en av initiativtagerne til og nøkkelaktørene påden libanesiske friimprovisasjons- og eksperimentelle musikkscenen. Han er med-grunnlegger av MILL, den kulturelle musikkforeningen bak Irtijal, en årlig improvisasjonsmusikkfestival som har blitt avholdt i Beirut siden 2001 (www.irtijal. org), og med-grunnlegger av Al Maslakh, det første plateselskapet for eksperimentell musikk i regionen - i drift siden 2005.

Som trompetspiller dytter Kerbaj instrumentets grenser, i fotsporene av pionerer som Bill Dixon, Axel Dörner og Franz Hautzinger. Han har opptrådt solo og med ulike grupper siden 2000 – i Mellomøsten, Europa, Canada og USA.

I 2015 ble han artist-in-residence ved Berlin-kollektivet DAAD.

Suha Traboulsi chose to participate in this exhibition by selecting other artists to participate in her place, 2018
Paint and wall text
150 x 290 cm

After beginnings in painting and following her encounter with the conceptual works and writings of Farid Sarroukh, Traboulsi began to turn her attention to language. She looked into aspects of time and space in an extensive series of works involving texts and numerical combinations on paper. She combined these conceptual investigations in her Antithesis series (1968-70). Traboulsi’s first solo exhibition was the mail art project Two Untitled Projects (1969), which was published
in the magazine 0 to 9 (edited by Vito Acconci). She was the only Palestinian woman artist to participate in important exhibitions such as Concept Art (1969) in Leverkusen (Germany), or Information (1970) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time she had decided to pursue an academic study of philosophy, as she did not feel content with a lay person’s approach to philosophical doctrines.

Traboulsi first gained national attention in the Arab world in the 1970s as an influential and often controversial figure in the Amman, Cairo and Beirut art, performance and conceptual art movements. Once ironically termed the “witch of contemporary art,” Traboulsi achieved notoriety with her sensationalist performance work, in which she investigated the psychological experience of personal danger and physical risk.

Cactus, I-IV, 2016
Black and white photographic prints 
152 x 152 x 5 cm each
Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery, Paris

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”

While the cactus was planted in the past to define limits and borders for each piece of property, to control the exterior and interior movement, we are witnessing a current proliferation of borders and limits that take the shape of walls, wires and fences. We live in a new historical era, where the hostility of a cactus plant is insufficiently offensive, so wires are erected to assist the plant.

Ziad Antar’s «Cactus» series is an ongoing project that is following the historicity of territorial constructions focusing on clashes and bonds between the old organic borders and the new industrial ones. Before the fact that those border lines exercise a political, economical and vital impact on land, people and nature, Antar is witnessing and documenting this escalation of oppression; after all a cactus gives a fruit but wires don’t.

Ziad Antar (b. 1978, Saida, Lebanon) is a video artist and photographer. He graduated with a degree in Agricultural Engineering from the American University of Beirut in 2001.

He has recently held solo exhibitions at Almine Rech Gallery, London (2017); Selma Feriani Gallery, Tunis (2017); Beirut Exhibition Center (2016); Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels (2014); La Criée Centre D’Art Contemporain, Rennes (2014); La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseilles (2013); Sharjah Art Foundation (2012), Seoul Museum of Art (2010) and Beirut Art Centre (2009) amongst others. Recent group exhibitions
have taken place at Nottingham Contemporary (2017); MASP Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2016); Sharjah Art Foundation (2016); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2015), Bruges Triennial (2015); New Museum, New York (2014 and 20019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014 and 2011); Gawngju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014); the 54th International Venice Biennial (2011) and Tate Modern, London (2008).

A Tale on Borders, 2018 
HD Video, 42:47 min. 
Exhibition Version

In spring 2017 a group of performers (Palestinian and Norwegian) travels from Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank) via Occupied Golan Heights (Syria) to the Lebanese border in the North. The performers want to dance for a Lebanese audience. The Lebanese audience travels from Beirut, towards the Israeli border in the south, aiming to watch the dance. The video is a documentation of an attempt to intervene in borders that today constitute this very landscape. From Ramallah to Beirut.

If the groups were to reach the north and south border, it seemed unlikely that it would be possible for the groups to stay very long at any possible location. In order to enable the audience to enjoy the performance in full, the chosen strategy was to try to execute sections of the performance at different locations moving West along the border, from Fatima gate in southern Lebanon through to the sea border.

Helle Siljeholm (b. 1981) is a choreographer, performer and visual artist, based in Oslo. She holds a BA (hons) from London Contemporary Dance School in 2003. In 2016 she graduated with an MA in Visual Arts from the Oslo Academy of Art (KHiO).

Recent projects, group- and solo exhibitions include: Hey, lets wait for the group!, Chambre d'Amis, Vienna (2015), Black Mountain - An Interdisciplinary experiment 1933 - 1957, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2015), Area Y, Siljeholm/Christophersen, Palestine (2015-16), Cosmic Latte, Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger (2016), IS- SLOTTET AND THE FLOW OF BODY SPACES, Malmö Kunsthall and Nordisk Panorama - Nordic Short & Doc Film Festival, Malmö (2016), IX Shiryeavo Biennale, Shiryeavo (2016), Siste Skrik- an art auction, The National Theatre, Oslo (2016), Nodes on stars fish and the social, Black Box Theatre, Oslo (2017). Looking at chemicals, Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2017), Nodes on rocks and other social landscapes, Høstscena og Jugendstilsenteret og KUBE, Ålesund (2017).

Behind the Sun, 2013 
Video, 10 min.

In the past few years, the apocalypse has become a resurgent concept. With the Arab Spring, riots, financial crises, civil wars, natural disasters and random incidents of terrorism, apocalyptic theories have multiplied as we continue to live under uncertain circumstances. The future is dark, and the present seems to be ever more destructive in a myriad of ways. But how has the image of the apocalypse changed aesthetically because of this modern predicament? Is it still imagined within the religious framework of doomsday, or has it morphed into divergent more realistic scenarios?

At the end of the First Gulf War in 1991, countless oil fields in Kuwait were set ablaze during the retreat of the invading forces as a final act of defiance. The months following the war were nothing short of the classic biblical apocalypse: the earth belching out fire and the black scorched sky felt like a portrait of hell as it should be – an almost romanticized vision of the end of the world. Lured by the surrealism of this present-day hell, Werner Herzog shot “Lessons of Darkness” (1992), a docu-fiction film in which he combined images of the oil fires with Christian biblical texts and a Wagner soundtrack. Inspired by his endeavor twenty years later, this work re-explores this cataclysmic event, and attempts to expand its meaning, especially because the idea of imminent doom is ever more present.

In this installation, amateur VHS footage of the oil fires is juxtaposed with audio monologues from Islamic television programs of the same period. At the time, the tools used to represent Islam consisted primarily of visualizing God through natural miracles. Trees, waterfalls, mountains, animals and insect life were the visual staples of religious media, and the narration was not that of the Qur’an, but of beautiful Arabic poetry recited by a skilled orator with a deep voice. This holistic image of religion has been increasingly replaced by social and political interpretations of religious scripture. Therefore, the images of dying nature effectively represent the death of nature within religion. Since, then, religion’s subsequent mutation into new extreme imaginaries parallels the transforming portrait of “the end of the world”.

Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at Sursock Museum, Beirut (2017); Gasworks, London (2017); Stroom Den Haag, the Hague (2017); ACUD Macht Neu, Berlin (2017); ATHR Gallery, Jeddah (2017); the Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2011 & 2014); and Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan (2009). Her participation in collective international exhibitions includes: 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, Sao Paulo (2017); «Glasstress 2017» Palazzo Franchetti San Marco, Venice (2017); «Let’s Talk about the Weather: Art & Ecology in a Time of Crisis» Sursock Museum, Beirut (2016); «Invisible Threads: Technology & its Discontents» NYU Abu Dhabi (2016); «DUST» CCA Warsaw, Poland (2015); «Whose Subject Am I?» Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Germany (2015); «Accented» Maraya Arts Center, Sharjah, UAE (2015); «The Return of Ghosts» Hong-Gah Museum, Taiwan (2014); «Never Never Land» Edge of Arabia Projects, London (2014); «Exposure» Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2013); «X-Apartments» Home Works 6, Beirut, Lebanon (2013); «50/20» Sultan Gallery Kuwait (2011); «Paradiso» Watermill Center, New York (2010); «Tokyo Wonder Wall» Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Japan (2008); and «In Transition Russia» Moscow Center of Contemporary Art (2008). Her videos and short films have been screened at: Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt (2017), Le Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016), Berlinale - Berlin International Film Festival (2014), «Where is My Territory?» Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014); «Parle Pour Toi» Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris (2014); Medrar Cairo Video Festival, Egypt (2014); «Aboveground Animation» New Museum, New York (2012); «Art Screen» Obrero, Sweden (2012); «Arab Shorts» Arsenale, Berlin (2012) and the Gulf Film Festival in Dubai (2008 & 2009) among others.

After Eight, 2014
Installation with 27 parts (16 are included here)
Hand and machine stitched embroidery on textile done by the artist 
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg and Beirut

After Eight is made of various hand and machine knit sentences that the artist embroidered on intimate surfaces, that help her register her notes and contradicting thoughts and findings resulting from ongoing research into the impacts of colonialism on language, specifically in Lebanon and in Syria. In Lebanon, French is fetishized, in contrast Arabic is compulsory in Syria, since both the union with Egypt and the Assad regime.

Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978, Beirut, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut and Amsterdam. Mounira studied painting at the Lebanese University, Beirut from 1998 to 2001, and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam from 2003 to 2006. She was also Research Resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2007 and 2008. In 2008, Al Solh started NOA Magazine, a performative gesture co-edited with collaborators such as Fadi El Tofeili and Mona Abu Rayyan, and Jacques Aswad (NOA III).

She has had solo exhibitions at ALT, Istanbul (2016); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014); Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut (2014); Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2013); Art in General, New York (2012) and Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2011). As well as group exhibitions at dOCUMENTA 14, Athens & Kassel (2017); 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); New Museum, New York (2014); Homeworks, Beirut (2013); House of Art, Munich (2010); and the 11th International Istanbul Biennial (2009).

The Reconstruction of the Arab Highway, 2007
C-print, 180 cm x 220 cm
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg and Beirut

The development of the Pan-Arab Highway aimed to upgrade Lebanon's road infrastructure and facilitate travel between Beirut and Damascus, and indirectly between Lebanon, Jordan and the Arab Gulf. Planned and implemented by PM
Rafic Harari's (1944-2005) government in the 1990s, the highway reflected the improvement of relations between Lebanon and Syria. But the assassination of PM Hariri in 2005 and the subsequent withdrawal of the Syrian Army form Lebanon were both signs of a major conflict between the two countries.

A year later, during the July War in 2006, Israel bombed the portion of the highway that bridged over Dahr el Baydar, East of Beirut, towards the Syrian border, while trying to stop the transport of arms to Hezbollah through Syria. This image of the destroyed highway was symbolic of the deterioration of the Lebanese-Syrian relations. Funnily enough the re-building of the bridge in 2007 was followed with Lebanese PM Saad Hariri's visit to Damascus in 2009.

The reconstruction of the highway started with an orchestrated detonation of what remained of the bridge in order to rebuild it again. This is the moment that is captured in Zaatari's «Reconstruction of the Arab Highway».

Akram Zaatari (b. 1966, Saida, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut. He has produced more than forty films and videos, a dozen books, and countless installations of photographic material, all pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, intimacies among men, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut's contemporary art scene. He was one of a handful of young artists who emerged from the delirious but short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon's television industry, which was radically reorganized after the country's civil war. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, a groundbreaking, artist-driven organization devoted to the research and study of photography in the region, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on photography and its disintegration, preservation and archival practice.

Zaatari represented Lebanon at the Venice biennale 2013. He has shown his films, videos, photographs, and other documents in institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in NY, Tate Modern in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, MACBA in Barcelona and Kunsthaus Zurich. He has taken part in Documenta13 (2012), the biennials of Gwangju, Liverpool, Istanbul, Sao Paulo and Sydney. His films have screened at the Berlinale, FID Marseille, Rotterdam, Toronto, and Oberhausen film festivals.

Waiting for the Barbarians, 2013
HD video, color and sound, English 
Animated photograph, 4:30 min. loop

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate 
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader. 
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, 
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes 
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today 
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual 
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come. And some who have just returned from the border say 
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Waiting for the Barbarians, by Constantine Peter Cavafy, 1904 Translated from Greek by Edmund Keeley

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was an Alexandrian poet, journalist and civil servant.

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige collaborate as filmmakers and artists, producing cinematic and visual artwork that interwine. For the last 15 years, they have focused on the images, representations and history of their home country, Lebanon, and questioned the fabrication of imaginaries in the region and beyond.

Together, they have directed documentaries such as «Khiam 2000-2007» (2008) and «El Film el Mafkoud» (The Lost Film) (2003) and feature films such as «Al Bayt el Zaher» (1999) and «A Perfect Day» (2005).

Their last feature film, «Je Veux Voir» (I Want to See), starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroue, premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2008. The French critics Guild selected it as Best Film Singulier 2008.

Their artworks have been shown in museums, biennials and art centers around the world, in solo or collective exhibitions and are part of important public and private collections, such as Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; FNAC France; the Guggenheim, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, France; V & A London, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE. They are recipients of the 2012 Abraaj Capital Art Prize with A Letter Can Always Reach Its Destination.

In 2012 they presented their feature documentary «The Lebanese Rocket Society, the strange tale of the Lebanese space race» and a series of artistic installations around the space project of the 60s.

Between April 6-8 Joana Hadjithomas & Kahlil Joriege was featured in a film program at Cinemateket in Oslo. An artist talk will took place on April 8.