Photography (Photography)

“The two men were relatives and both were in the Lebanese Army.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948. Like all studio photographers his subjects came to him.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution. The lecture looks at the central role that the photographs taken with these devices played in informing and mobilizing people during the revolutionary events, due to their ability to be shared and spread through virtual and viral communication platforms.

Photography (Photography)

“Films inspired people a lot. they came to perform kissing in front of a camera. In a conservative society such as Saida, people were willing to play the kiss between two people of the same sex, but very rarely between a man and a woman.

Photography (Photography)

“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving. Sometimes a member of the family whould hide behind, holding the child.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948. Like all studio photographers his subjects came to him. The studio was a constant flux of visitors.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“When you position your hand on someone’s shoulder, your shoulders become straight and horizontal. Placing one’s hand on a stable surface helps position the shoulders and the general posture of the body.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“Other photographers used to send me negatives of cross-eyed people, asking me to retouch them. I used to scratch out the emulsion where the pupil is, and draw another one right next to it.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself. He was upset to know that she came to be photographed in my studio without telling him. He came asking for the negatives.

Photography (Photography)

“In the 1980s I started using coloured paper backdrops, one of which was yellow. You can see they never reached the floor. I used them for colour and black-and-white photography.” Hashem El Madani.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The End of Time

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure.

Photography (Photography)

It is a little known fact that Lebanese historians were also gamblers during the war. They met every Sunday at the race courses. Race after race, the historians were positioned behind the press photographers who were there to take a picture of the winning horse passing the finishing line.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“The Lebanese wars of the past three decades affected Lebanon’s residents physically and psychologically: from the hundred thousand plus who were killed; to the two hundred thousand plus who were wounded; to the million plus who were displaced; to the even more who were psychologically traumatized. Needless to say, the wars also affected Lebanese cities, buildings and institutions. It is clear to me today that these wars also affected colours, lines, shapes and forms.

Painting (Painting)

Adnan’s paintings are simple images with bold contrasting colors and rich textures. This particular work has an iconic feel and a strong physical presence in spite of its diminutive size. All of her paintings are small but, like Howard Hodgkin’s work, their intensity gains from their diminutive size.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With the war-torn Beirut cityscape as its backdrop—urban alleys, glistening beaches, abandoned buildings—Eric Baudelaire’s complex film, The Ugly One , unfolds in a time and place that vacillates among revolutionary narratives of the past, the fragile and ever-changing political situation of the present, and attempts to piece together the memories of those that live, or once lived, in the city. Conceived as a sequel to his documentary The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), Baudelaire builds the structure of the film around a story told by Japanese New Wave film director Adachi, who also narrates the film. The plot line pivots around two lovers and former resistance fighters, Michel (played by Lebanese artist and actor Rabih Mroué) and Lili (Juliette Navis); their narratives fragment and reconfigure around the screenplay, which itself intertwines with Adachi’s own history, the act of making the film, and the self-conscious and sometimes improvisatory process of writing the script.

Photography (Photography)

This image is an extract from a notebook in the archives of doctor Fakhouri that lists the cars that have been used for bombs between 1975 and 1991. Each page of the notebook contains a collage of an image of a car with the same make, model and color as the exploded car with a text in Arabic that gives the details of the place, time and date of the explosion, the number of people in the accident, the perimeter of destruction, the weight and the type of explosive. The images of the cars made visible are only equivalents since the cars that actually exploded are totally destroyed.

NFT (NFT)

For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders. The series of looping three-dimensional animated videos are only seconds long—a timespan familiar to gif and online meme culture—and feature global dictators, strongmen and strongwomen, kings and queens, princes and princesses, emirs, sheikhs and sheikhas, sultans, shahs, emperors and empresses, popes, ayatollahs, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and GOATs. The subject of cakes has a specific personal meaning for Raad, whose first job as an adolescent was photographing pastries at a bakery in Beirut.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I’ve heard stories (2008) is one of Marwa Arsanios early works. It is a short animated film staging a story that took place at the Carlton hotel in Beirut. This work is the first part of a longer project on this iconic building.

Photography (Photography)

Rocket Society refers to a space project led by a group of Armenian researchers at the beginning of the 1960s. They created the first Middle Eastern rocket and carried out a dozen launches. Today, there is a kind of amnesia related to this space program while at that time the newspapers would talk about it frequently; a postal stamp was even issued for the occasion.