Grant awarded Spring 2014

With the Kossak grant, I traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to conduct research for my MA thesis. My starting point was the notion of the city as it is approached within an art historical framework: how do we define the city, and what is the relationship of art to the city? I am curious about the role that art plays, or can play, in imagining, defining, or even creating a city.

This topic has particular resonance in Beirut, which still bears the scars of a 15-year-long civil war that tore Lebanon apart from 1975 to 1990. Both the physical and social fabrics of the city were damaged, and in many ways, wounds have been left open: there is no official memorial to help mourn and move forward, for example, and the on-going process of reconstruction continues to be contested. At the same time, in the postwar period there has been a significant amount of art produced that represents and layers aspects of the city’s spatial realm and its social and political history. Given that the physical city is very much in flux, and considering this particular body of postwar art, I wondered: what role does art have in imagining and defining postwar Beirut?

The Kossak grant allowed to explore first hand the spaces of Beirut that are being reproduced and re-imagined in paintings, photographs, and various other mediums. I saw art within the context of the city, and I investigated the network of the arts community there—because in addition to the art that is being made, there is also a network of art spaces that allows for the visibility of the art, not only within Beirut, but abroad as well.

My experiences fed directly into the argument for my thesis:

Beirut seems to be disappearing. Throughout the city, one finds the past and the future in stark contrast in terms of both the architectural styles and the state of refurbishment of individual buildings and even entire neighborhoods. Bullet-ridden concrete and abandoned buildings are reminders of years of complex political-religious conflicts and of colonial histories; construction sites and sleek new sidewalks and facades indicate plans for a prosperous and normalized future. Such juxtaposition leads to an acute awareness of time—in particular, of a void in the present, as if the city exists only in states of past and future tense, while evaporating despite itself in the present. When history and the ideals of the future assert themselves so strongly, how can Beirut remain vital in the present?

Since around the time of the end of the civil war, in 1990, a number of artists in or from Beirut and working in diverse media have taken the city—its buildings, landmarks, ruins, maps, construction sites, and architectural details—as visual source material to explore ideas of memory, identity, history, truth, and fiction. By critically engaging and reframing these aspects of Beirut’s spatial realm, such work reanimates the temporally-laden or ignored spaces from which the images come, and in doing so, explicitly reckons with the city’s past, future, and absent present. Thus it seems a possible answer to the question is, in Beirut, the present is made visible—indeed, vital—in art.