Review
BEIRUT: "Image: Fixe,
Mobile, Animee," the exhibition currently up at the gallery of
the French Cultural Center (CCF), features the photographic
and video works of Gilbert Hage, Ricardo Mbarkho and Ziad
Abillama, three major players in Lebanon's contemporary art
scene. Accompanying their work is that of 15 younger artists,
all former students of ALBA - the University Of Balamand's
Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts.
All the artists use new
communication and information technologies - digital
photography, experimental video, 2 and 3-D animation and video
games - to create a provocative visual language. The object is
to interrogate Lebanon's memory and trigger strong emotional
reactions. Shocking images are not censored.
The exhibition's works
question identity in the Lebanese and wider Middle Eastern
socio-political contexts. What is particularly powerful here
is the constant link between technique and expression: the
freedom of one frees the other.
Many of the younger artists
are inspired by Ricardo Mbarkho's research on identity.
Mbarkho, 35, graduated from ALBA (where he presently teaches)
and Paris' National School of Fine Arts. He defends new media
art as cheap, easily copied and reproduced, an art that should
be deeply lived and not simply watched.
His 2007 piece "Arameans"
questions the mobility of Aramaic-speakers in Lebanon,
focusing on a woman who survived an explosion in Beirut. In
this work, we recognize three of the artist's favorite themes
- identity, intra-communal relations and social confrontation
- enhanced by the use of split screens and distorted sound,
one of his favored techniques.
Elsewhere in the
exhibition, "Homeland 1," the latest work by photographer
Gilbert Hage, questions Lebanese identity from another
perspective. The photograph interrogates the aesthetic of
frontiers and territories by representing buildings in
Beirut's southern suburbs that were bombed during the summer
2006 war with Israel. He contrasts the stable lines of
still-standing buildings in the background and pieces of
destroyed ones in the foreground, using a filter to intensify
the color of concrete.
Contrast and contradiction
are also at the center of Frederic Lezmi's 2006 photo work
"Arabian Prospects," which represents areas destroyed during
the 1975-1990 Civil War in one part of the frame and new
scaffoldings in another. Beirut's urban landscape reflects a
society in perpetual reconstruction.
Politics are never entirely
divorced from religion in Ziad Abillama's video "Why don't you
stop dying?" His documentary-style camerawork interrogates the
Lebanese on their own history. Does Lebanon create its own
martyrs? Why do we sublimate death? Can history stop repeating
itself? These are some of the questions raised by this work,
the most thought-provoking of the exhibition.
In Hala Dabaji's work "Art
Grandeur Nature," characters face blind walls and shapes of
modern Beirut, seemingly confronting their own confusion.
Nayla Dabaji's photographs
draw a parallel between Irish and Lebanese religious conflicts
with representations of tagged streets and destroyed bridges.
She conveys an idea of disconnection and gaps that need
filling.
Video works explore the
many possibilities of digital technique: Sound
distortion, over-exposed images, gaps between speech and
subtitles and the introduction of archive images. Liberated
from cinematographic and televisual conventions - in terms of
cost, length, aesthetic, linear narration, and formatted
speech - such video art attempts to relate a complex reality.
Digital photography also
allows for boldness. Joanne Issa's 2008 series "Accord
Raccord," for example, displays six portraits of women whose
legs are cut and replaced by others. The resulting twisted
shapes convey instability and anxiety.
Innovative, mind blowing,
serious and humorous, "Image: Fixe, Mobile, AnimŽe" is a
must-see.
"Image: Fixe, Mobile,
AnimŽe" runs until March 6. For more information call +961 1
420 272.
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