The Home Works IV exhibition at Karantina's Galeri Sfeir-Semler is a colorful snapshot of, and testament to, the forum's diverse exploration of cultural practice, both at home and abroad.
Curated by Ashkal Alwan's Christine Thome, Sfeir-Semler's contribution to the 2008 event is a collection of musings on human catastrophe, displacement and is, ultimately, a eulogy for a place called home. A nine-strong group of international artists explores themes of memory and theft, and search for an identity that has long been taken away. Thome has set the exhibition a wide-ranging brief and, for the most part, it fulfills it with articulate flair. The pieces here are important ones, both as reflections of the contemporary art landscape and as interpretations of the environments, situations and ideas they speak of.
Ideas of home form the core of the collaboration between British artist Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat. Sheets of A4 fax paper, each providing advice on how to destroy a home pepper the bright gallery walls. From "Brick the doors and windows shut" to "Fill it with bad memories", the artists' epigrams strip-bare often idealized concepts of home and family. Whereas the slogans call for the destruction of the haven of home, the piece itself instigates the construction of a new enclosed space as the artists fax works from wherever they are to the machine in the corner of the gallery, and the fresh sheets are fixed to the walls and ceiling. This is a work of conflict, a concept that many of the other works in the exhibition also explore.
Marwan Rechmaoui's monumental Spectre, a concrete and mixed media sculpture of the apartment block he used to live in, is, similarly, a hypothesis on home and its removal, by force, from those who reside there. Abandoned in 2006 due to the summer bombardment of Lebanon by Israeli forces, the piece is incomplete. Additionally, the thin wooden supports that sustain the concrete apartments appear warped, expressing the larger impression of a delicately balanced structure; fragile, fraught and precariously glued together. The essence of home, perhaps.
AlBum by Kamal Aljafari, a huge installation-piece that resembles a bullet-holed photo album, contains a sombre slideshow of half constructed and abandoned Palestinian homes. Inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca's Romance Sonambulo, "But now I am not I, nor is my house now my house...", AlBum reminisces and laments the promises these half-built, now derelict, structures held for those who began construction on them. Contrasting film footage converges in the spine of the album, showing images that conflict with each other, yet echo and resonate in the common loss they are imbued with; steel girders and outstretched flower stalks creep out towards each other in the strange, silent poetry of a landscape that does not look as it was intended to. AlBum is a deeply claustrophobic piece that hints at the absence of the comforting details of day-to-day life, things that were never allowed to take root and flourish.
This is a well-judged collation of work, and a well-curated collection; Sfeir Semler is an apt setting for the step-by-step revelation of works and ideas the exhibition has been designed to achieve. From a dark, hidden room in which two disembodied hands hammer out Mozart's La Marche Turke on an unplugged electric keyboard, to Emily Jacir's Material for a Film, a tribute to assassinated Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, work-by-work, the artists delve into the show's central themes in increasingly creative and eloquent ways.
A tangible human rhythm is at the core of the pair of Ziad Antar films exhibited here. In La Corde, Antar suggests the inversion of a recognizable and comforting rhythm, and the implications for the lone man embroiled in it. In it, a man skipping in an enclosed courtyard "[plays] by the rules of a game" in which he must remove a piece of clothing every time he drops the rhythm of the rope. Each time he stumbles, he looks directly through the camera, with a tint of self-conscious uncertainty in his eyes. Having thrown a garment to a corner of the courtyard, he begins his routine again, staring a half-arrogant, half-vacant stare that exposes the truth that he is not in control of the ritual he has been charged to fulfil.
Walid Sadek's On Learning to See Less, looks at the conflict between displacement and stability; large sheets of paper, stacked in the entrance to the gallery, are printed with a miniature manual of sorts on the nature of partnership and on "how to see less" within it. It is an ever-diminishing piece as viewers are invited to take parts of the work home with them. Sadek is challenging the revolving issue of the relationship between viewer and artwork here. He has set a silent challenge to those who see On Learning To See Less; whether a viewer simply walks past it or delves in to claim a piece of it for themselves taps into the relevance of contemporary art, and hints at the impact the artist wants it to have on its audience. Sadek's work aims to involve rather than alienate and wants those who enter into its spirit to examine their relationship with the environment around them.
Emily Jacir pursues this undercurrent in Material for a Film, which won the Golden Lion for artists under the age of 40 at the Venice Biennale last year. Jacir has collected and collated fragments of the life of Wael Zuaiter, the Palestinian translator murdered by Israeli Mossad agents in Rome in October 1972. Installed in a labyrinthine space, Jacir has constructed a very personal portrait of the translator who became Europe's first victim of the wave of assassinations undertaken by the Mossad following the Munich massacre at the Olympic Games the preceding summer. The display of Material for a Film has the formal air of a museum about it, but Jacir has softened the boundaries by filling her installation with deeply personal and intimate parts of Zuaiter's life. Mahler's 9th Symphony, representing a long, intellectual friendship with Bruno Cagli, swirls around the space while crackling recordings of Zuaiter himself, made covertly by Italian security forces, scud through the gallery. These crackling recordings reveal his long partnership with Janet Venn-Brown, an Australian artist who kept them secretly, "for my own reasons", for over three decades. Jacir is, like Zuaiter was, a collector and has excavated parts of Zuatier's life and the climate that would eventually take it from him in an eloquent documentary of what his life and death represent.
The American artist Michael Rakowitz also performs the role of a modern-day excavator in his piece The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, a powerful response to the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in 2003. Rakowitz has photographed looted objects as they have been recovered, and recreated them from Arabic newspapers and food packaging. Each piece, made from materials found in America and labeled formally, as in a museum, represents the fragmentary nature of an American awareness of the Iraqi catastrophe, and how small a concern Iraq's ancient treasures were when US troops entered the country five years ago. Rakowitz's attention to detail is outstanding and he even succeeds in evoking the materials the looted pieces were made of; metallic food wrappers for an ancient gold bowl and the soft undulations of glued newspaper recreate the fragment of a three thousand year old stone foot. This is an important piece and an evolving one; 70 recovered pieces from the 7000 still unaccounted for have been recreated to date. Rakowitz could therefore, eventually, become the creator of a full-scale tribute to the incalculable historical and cultural wealth that was so easily destroyed and squandered in the spring of 2003.
Jalal Toufic's work underwhelms most here. The sheer amount of it and the concepts it tries to articulate have small impact when considered in the midst of the excellent work around it. Toufic's manipulated film posters seem a little too aware of themselves and fail, for the most part, to engage. They appear as distant speakers of a needlessly confusing concept making them, sadly, the weak link in an otherwise impressive exhibition.
Wael Zuaiter quoted the English mystic Francis Thompson in a commentary published shortly before he died and it is this sentiment that seems to summarize most eloquently what this group of Homeworks IV artists have strived to articulate, "Thou canst not stir a flower without disturbing a star." As a reflection of Homeworks IV, Sfeir-Semler's exhibition is an unparalleled tribute, and deserves to be savored for a while to come.
Homeworks IV: A Forum On Cultural Practices, until May 31
Galerie Sfeir-Semler in Karantina, Beirut 01-566550
Tags: Artists, Arts, Beirut, Culture, Exhibit, Home Works IV, Karantina, source: Ya Libnan
