FROM THE CITY THAT EXPLODED SLOWLY -  

Wall-Composition & Text 1:

 When I was 5, my mother took me to a large department store, called Byblos, on Martyr’s Square. She bought my first schoolbag there. I remember it well and I see myself holding it: its rubbery texture, rounded corners and black and white colours, all still tangible in my mind. People in Beirut often wondered why this store never did well despite its incessant publicity. After the war and extensive excavations, it was discovered that the store’s foundations had encroached on the very first walls of Beirut, Birut or Birayat as it was then called in 15 BC. Some people thought that was probably the reason it was jinxed.

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.

Editing New Work from Beirut (2)

Selected from previous writings :   

     Amid the tall marble towers and wide highways, lies a city full of gaps and dark actions. Running through it, is a green line broken up by brackets of amnesia where many disappeared with all their footsteps and shadows erased. There are many crosses marking oblivion on my mental map.

 

Editing New Work from Beirut

I have been editing new photographs taken in Beirut last December exploring sites of violence and sites of memory to possibly add to photo-text series 'The City that Exploded Slowly'.

This work is about reading the city as being in a constant process of erosion and dissolution which renders it full of gaps and a past erased by a tide of amnesia. On many of my return trips, travelling by car, I formed new maps in my mind: black violet stains would mark the spots where extreme violence has occurred along the mouth of the river, on secluded sites by the shore..