PIECE IN 'EAST & WEST : VISUALISING THE OTTOMAN CITY' EXHIBITION 

ABOUT THE CITY THAT EXPLODED SLOWLY (PHOTO-TEXT SERIES):

 

War and wilderness are often there in my work and sometimes converge more closely, as in the series The City That Exploded Slowly, because stories of warfare and of our abuse of the environment stem both from man’s struggle to control, tame and own the wilderness. My
art practice has evolved over the years into a multi-disciplinary approach combining photography and creative writing and mainly stems from an engagement with issues of migrancy, memory and identity most often relating to The Lebanon, my place of birth, and its history of conflicts.

What became a defining moment in my practice was experiencing the devastation of the centre of Beirut at the end of the civil war (1975-1990) on a scale rarely encountered. It is against this background of vast erasure that I started this autobiographical body of work including this series with the impetus of relocating memories in a space that seems to be endlessly entangled in a double helix of transformation and dissolution. At the core, was the notion that, for my mother as for myself, our sense of selves and our (hi)stories were deeply bound to this part of Beirut and its singular configuration and starting from the premise that there is always a city that lives on in each of us, I set out to map a trail of memories that was entrenched with the many transformations of Beirut. A process of re-visiting and re-translation by way of memory aided in coming to terms with the sense of loss and unreplaceability of place. 
There is a total of 6 wall-compositions in this series but only 4 will be shown in this exhibition. Each wall-composition consists of my own writing juxtaposed with a black and white photograph of my mother taken by street-photographers and a colour photograph  taken over several years in and around  the city centre of Beirut.