Seized by the magnitude of the collapse and by the country’s decline, the creative strength of Lebanese artists is today inscribed as a mark of resistance of the imaginary. Their speeches bear both the tragedies that continue to be experienced and the possible prospects for the future.
Lebanon, a land of legends and myths, has many paradoxes between wealth and poverty, gentleness and cruelty, truths and absurdities, and is this ruined figure who would embody a side of the world. A country in the in-between, whose present marks the limits before the fall or ascent. A country that one lives in a state of threshold, in the heart of the violence of what is. The spectres always awakened by a fifteen-year civil war, the total and unprecedented fall of a society, its crises: political, economic, environmental, its social dramas, are the daily life of the Lebanese. Every day there is a side of the world that touches the extremes. In suspension or rocking, experience the dizziness of a emptied or overflowing present.
Faced with intergenerational traumas, the presence of uncertainties, visceral corruption, shortages, we continue to live, to adapt, we also allow ourselves the right to dream. It is not resilience, it is a gift of meaning, a sharing, a dynamic of connections, a flow of thoughts and ideas. Then we give meaning to vertigo not as an anxiety but as an aspiration, a starting point for other possibilities of being and living. This exhibition brings together 16 Lebanese photographers and videographers, his journey invites three sequences to a question about the limits and possibilities of representation, narration and sublimation. It offers a sensitive reading that tries to grasp the stakes of creation in a context of collapse. How do trauma and disasters affect bodies and minds?
How do artists translate the dynamics of territories, circulations, anchorages and historical and cultural resonances? How to confront and transcribe individual or collective emotions, obsessions, time scales, erasures? How can we represent the visions and desires of a renewal?
In a necessarily fragmentary way, political and poetic questions are revealed where the lived experiences, the bursts of reality and the shores of fiction cultivate the critical and creative impulse. Here, a glimpse of the light of an exploration of photographic and visual languages is opened and experienced. A breach like a breakthrough, where vertigo lives, those who tap into what cannot be destroyed.
Artists on display:
Joanna Andraos Valérie Cachard & Gregory Buchakjian Jack Dabaghian Rami el Sabbagh Paul Gorra Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige Gilbert Hage Laetitia Hakim and Tarek Haddad Roger Moukarzel Nasri Sayegh Caroline Tabet Lara Tabet Tanya Traboulsi
Exhibition from Saturday 9 July to Sunday 6 November 2022 Logis abbatial de l'Abbaye de Jumièges
Commissioners: Clémence Cottard-Hachem and Laure d'Hauteville
Visual: Stele(s) – Study / Landscapes, Exquis, 2020, Nasri Sayegh © Nasri Sayegh