HOME WORK
The National
0/REVIEW/749525830/1007
Jan 30 2009
United Arab Emirates
Beirut finally has a permanent, non-commercial arts centre. Kaelen
Wilson-Goldie reports from the opening.
On the night of January 15, more than 1,000 people trekked out to a
former wood and furniture factory on the eastern edge of Beirut to
attend the opening of a contemporary art exhibition. The formerly
rundown, two-storey building had been radically transformed from an
industrial carcass to a luminous white cube filled with photographs,
video screens and sound installations. Inside, the crowd murmured,
high-heeled boots clicked along the concrete floors, and a steady
chorus of triple-kissed greetings (Lebanon’s most readily identifiable
social tic) rang out. On its surface, it could have been any night
in the life of the local art scene. But this wasn’t just another
new show. It was also a new – and in many respects unprecedented –
art space.
Five years in the making, the Beirut Art Centre is a permanent rather
than temporary venue. It is defiantly non-commercial. It is the result
of collective effort. And in these respects, it is the first sign
of a potentially major shift in how artist, curators and cultural
organisers function in Beirut.
The Lebanese capital hosts one of the most vibrant and celebrated
contemporary art scenes in the Middle East. L’Agenda Culturel, Beirut’s
biweekly listings guide to cultural happenings in and around the city,
routinely fills its pages with enough events to keep art lovers active
every night of the week. The city has proven itself a reliable platform
for international talents, and curators from abroad regularly visit
the city to select works or conduct in-depth research.
But even though Beirut possesses a critical mass of creative
figures, the contemporary art scene has operated for 15 years as
a hyper-flexible, ever-malleable system with precious few brick
and mortar spaces to call its own. The city boasts no modern or
contemporary art museum. You can count its commercial art galleries
on two hands (the good ones, on one). And the Lebanese government
allocates little to no money for the arts. In fact, Beirut’s
cultural vitality may be a by-product of Lebanon’s weakness as a
state: censorship is arbitrary at best, and the city has long been
a laboratory for free experimentation in politics as in art. The
city’s contemporary art scene may be defined by a lack of official
infrastructure more than anything else (for this reason, some refer
to Beirut as a post-museum city).
In the mid 1990s, a slew of artist-led organisations – such as Ashkal
Alwan, the Arab Image Foundation and Beirut DC – started creating new
channels for the production and presentation of new work. They staged
interventions in public spaces, organised exhibitions in warehouses,
and programmed forums and festivals in rented theatres that were often
aesthetically and technically unsuitable. These organisations never
seriously pushed for the creation of civic structures like art museums
or research institutions; as they convincingly argued, neither the
political will nor the financial backing was ever there. Outside of
small, administrative offices, they never burdened themselves with
buying or renting venues of their own, or with programming events
that continued throughout the year. Beirut’s contemporary art scene is
therefore ephemeral by definition and design; one cannot pin its energy
to any specific sites. It materialises in bursts of activity: here
today, gone tomorrow, back in a few weeks. All of it is documented in
catalogues and archival videos. But aside from some rather high-minded
graffiti, it makes few physical impressions on the city itself.
That might not be the case a year from now, and not just because
of the Beirut Art Centre. Ashkal Alwan, which is directed by the
curator Christine Tohme, is planning to open a permanent space –
with studios, a library and a multimedia theatre – in seven or
eight months time. Its primary functions will be to host Beirut’s
first contemporary art academy and to give Ashkal Alwan’s annual Home
Works Forum, until now a peripatetic event, a home. At the same time,
Lebanon’s Ministry of Culture is currently conducting an international
architectural competition for Dar Bayrut, a centre for art and culture
to be built in the downtown district with a $20 million gift from the
Sultanate of Oman (it came just after Lebanon’s 2006 war). As such,
Beirut may not be a post-museum city, but rather a city just beginning
to experiment with different museum models.
The idea for the Beirut Art Centre dates back to a tough talk
between two fiery redheads. In 2004, the artist Lamia Joreige sat
down with Sandra Dagher to discuss Espace SD, the gallery that Dagher
had directed since 2000. Espace SD – with its two exhibition floors,
small theatre, cafe, bookshop and design boutique – opened before the
Gemmayzeh neighbourhood became Beirut’s hipster enclave. As the area
gentrified, the gallery became its artsy anchor. The quality of the
exhibitions was inconsistent, but the predominantly young people that
used the space cherished it as a sanctuary and a playground. Still,
Joreige saw limitations: Since Espace SD catered to the local art
market, many of its shows were financially viable but aesthetically
uninteresting.
"I was very critical of Espace SD," she says today.
"I was justifying myself," recalls Dagher.
Somehow, by the end of the conversation, Dagher had convinced Joreige
to form a new initiative within the gallery that would address her
criticisms from the inside out. But as they began to discuss the idea
further, they realised that what they really wanted was to create
something entirely new: a new structure, a new idea.
"The concept came very quickly," says Dagher. "We realised there
was a need for another kind of space that would be non-profit and
accessible to artists whose work is less commercial.
"Our initial idea hasn’t changed since 2004," says Joreige. "The idea
then was to create a structure that would be democratic, in a space
that would be designed specifically for contemporary art. The idea
is not original. It’s just necessary. And this is it."
The necessity is four-fold: first, that the space be active and open to
the public all year round; second, that the space be capable of hosting
local, regional and international initiatives, whether exhibitions
proper or series of events; third, that the space be defined, and its
artistic direction determined, not by a single curator but rather by
an executive board; and fourth, that the space be supported by the
community and through a diversified pool of funds.
So, in addition to seeking out corporate sponsorship, Dagher and
Joreige created a donor scheme – with benefactors, patrons, supporters
and friends (all of their names placed prominently on walls and in
annual brochures) – along with a membership plan in which people
give a small and essentially symbolic amount of money in return for
a small and essentially symbolic set of benefits.
"I think people should get more involved, "says Dagher. "With Espace
SD, when I told people we were closing (in the spring of 2007),
they were shocked and sad. The reaction was great and for that I was
grateful. But then some people said to me: ‘No, you are not allowed
to close.’ And I wanted to ask them: ‘Well, what have you done to
make the space work?’ For me it’s important to say: ‘OK, you want a
space to happen? You have to participate in one way or another.’"
The Beirut Art Centre is a stand-alone building with 1,500 square
metres of exhibition space. There is a theatre for screenings and
performances, a carefully stocked bookstore and a cafe, complete with a
rooftop terrace (which is still under construction). There are several
"mediatheque" stations strewn throughout the space, each a sharply
designed cubicle of sorts in which visitors can sit and use a special
computer terminal to browse through an archive of contemporary artworks
from the region. Arranged by country, medium, artist and artwork, the
mediatheque stations make Arab and Middle Eastern cultural production
available to the Lebanese public for the first time.
The Centre plans to mount four major exhibitions a year, to be
complemented by weekly video screenings, talks, round table discussions
and performances. It is also developing an educational outreach
programme, organising workshops for local students and conducting
guided tours for local schools. It all sounds seamless, but it wasn’t
easy, and it took more time than either Dagher or Joreige expected.
Ever since their initial brainstorming sessions in 2004, Dagher
and Joreige have been toiling behind the scenes: establishing the
Beirut Art Centre as a legally registered non-profit association,
fund-raising far and wide, and searching for a site. Over the past
five years, they’ve secured pledges of financial support somewhere
in the vicinity of $600,000. They’ve also found – and lost – no fewer
than 10 potential spaces.
"Every time our hearts would beat," says Joreige. "Every space we
wanted would require a few months of meetings with architects and
negotiations with owners. Every space was either too expensive or too
big or too small. We found one space, and then Rafik Hariri (Lebanon’s
former prime minister) was killed. There was another space that we
found. We had been working on it for many months. Then the war in 2006
happened and the deal fell through. Spaces are very weird in Beirut."
Dagher first saw the Beirut Art Centre’s space two years ago, but
at the time, the owner – or rather the 12 heirs who jointly own the
building and are scattered across Europe and the Middle East – wanted
to sell rather than rent. A year later, they changed their minds,
and a year after that, papers were signed and keys were obtained. The
Beirut Art Centre now has a four-year lease, and according to Dagher,
the long-term plan is to buy the building outright.
"Everything went very fast after we registered with the municipality
and got the keys," says Dagher.
For that reason, the first exhibition, Closer, is composed entirely of
already produced works. None were commissioned for the show. Still,
the exhibition is convincingly unified by an apt and ingenious
curatorial conceit. The overarching theme is intimacy, and the ways
in which art shapes private experiences into public expressions.
Missing Links, Cynthia Zaven’s gorgeous, melancholy sound installation
accompanied by poetic texts and blurred photographs, demands that
viewers lower their heads toward the work to hear the whispers of
muted conversations. The piece slips between fact and fantasy as Zaven
strolls through Istanbul, collecting traces of her Armenian grandfather
who fled Constantinople not because of the genocide but because he fell
in love with a woman, Zaven’s grandmother, and followed her to Beirut.
Jananne al Ani’s five-channel video installation A Loving Man thrusts
viewers into a womblike space, a circular room draped in darkness. On
each screen is a woman’s face. Clearly, all five are sisters. Riffing
on the children’s memory game, in which lines are added to a story in
rounds, they construct a moving narrative about their missing father,
sentence by repeated sentence, memory by painful memory.
Jil Magid’s Composite consists of a slide projection, a handwritten
letter and an audio track. For the work, Magid asked former lovers
to describe her face from memory. Then she gave the descriptions to
police artists, who drew her as they would the suspect of a crime. The
resulting sketches vary wildly. Who among these men ever really knew
her? On the wall is a handwritten letter Magid sent to one man, asking
him to record his description of her. Through headphones, we hear
his narration, which gradually becomes less and less precise, less
and less sure, as if putting the image of a former lover into words
obliterates his ability to recall anything precise about her at all,
as if seeing her in his mind simultaneously erases her from his memory.
Overall, the exhibition is pensive and tender; each work pulls viewers
in and holds them close. It is also a clever ruse, requiring visitors
to spend time in the space taking in the artworks, getting to know
the Centre – and then, maybe, contributing to its survival.