From May 13, 2013 to June 6, 2013
Galerie Tanit, Mar Mikhael, Beirut, Lebanon
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TOUFICAN RUINS?
PHOTOS BY GILBERT HAGE, © 2006
Pigmented print of fine art paper mounted on aluminium, 220 x 282 cm, edition 1 of 3
“I predict that when war-damaged buildings have vanished from Beirut’s scape, some people will begin complaining to psychiatrists that they are apprehending even reconstructed buildings as ruins. While the imagination of disaster for a city such as Los Angeles, which has not already been reduced to ruins, is that of its destruction, exemplarily in an earthquake, for Beirut it is fundamentally that of its revelation when reconstructed as still a ruined city.” (Jalal Toufic)
ATTEMPT 137 TO MAP THE DRIVE
VIDEO BY JALAL TOUFIC AND GRAZIELLA RIZKALLAH TOUFIC, 7 MINUTES, © 2011
“Keywords: videotaped in Beirut’s central district circa 2000; Toufican ruins; labyrinth; drive (also in the sense of Trieb); taxi driver in Beirut dying to figure out why his customer would specify the year of his destination, ‘the Central Business District, 2000’; potential lipograms; timely and untimely collaboration.” (Jalal Toufic)
WOULD THAT A SURVIVOR
INSTALLATION BY WALID SADEK, © 2013
Framed as a posthumous figure, or that which lives on in spite of its death, the survivor is an impediment to the reconstruction of society along normative guidelines. But the persistent conditions of protracted civil-war in Lebanon call for a re-conceptualization of the figure of the survivor along another temporal axis: no longer posthumous, the survivor is not an over-liver but rather a witness who knows too much carrying an unwelcome but necessary knowledge to begin his labour of ruin.
