SPECIAL FOCUS
Maher Abi Samra, still from Merely a Smell, 2007, video, 7 min Lamia Joreige, still from Nights and Days, 2007, video, 17 min
Ali Cherri, still from Slippage, 2007, video, 12 min Rania Rafei, still from Brain Cells, 2007, video, 14 min
Such aversion marks the work of other artists who, evidently less A diary of Joreige’s struggle with how to respond to a war that
comfortable with framing the detritus of war, self-consciously focus on didn’t damage her personally, Nights and Days captures the oppressive
art or artistic practice. In Ali Cherri’s Slippage (2007), for instance, the stillness that – Dahyeh concussions aside – was Beirut’s wartime
artist appears within the white frame naked from the waist up. A text soundtrack. She also discusses the conflict between the audience’s
tells us a man once disappeared from his house, leaving an 80-cm-wide wanting to see bombs exploding and the morality of recording it:
hole, taking with him only a book and some manuscripts. In the distance by waiting for such a shot, the artist is complicit in the subsequent
the camera captures mass movement – manuscript leaves or a flock of death and destruction. Here, then, bomb and shell blasts accompany
pigeons or thousands of breeze-borne Israeli propaganda flyers. The mundane activities like plant-watering, while the camera’s search for
image dissolves into a bomb hole in a roof or bridge before returning ruined buildings finds only the glare of a setting sun.
to the flock of windblown flyers that dissolve into thin air. The work Joreige’s approach is echoed in that of Charraf, who also
captures two of the more striking images from the conflict but uproots asks what role the artist can play, paralysed by a conflict that he, by
and reembeds them in a fictional narrative – Ilya Kabakov’s installation definition, doesn’t control. Alienated from any active, let alone heroic
The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1981–88). In doing role, the artist – here Beiruti improv trumpeter and cartoonist Mazen
so, it aestheticises one of the most visceral responses to war, the urge Kerbaj – is left to wait for a bomb blast to which he can reply musically.
to flee. When the bombs don’t oblige, he can only stride through the rubble of
Emotionally abraded but never under direct attack, north Dahyeh. He stops, then reenters the frame and confronts the enormous
Beirutis were made ambivalent spectators to the 2006 war, a theme destruction with an abbreviated bleat from his trumpet.
taken up by both Lamia Joreige’s Nights and Days (2007) and Wissam
Charaf’s A Hero Never Dies (2006).
ARTREVIEW zero.linzero.lineight.lineight.lin
p081-087 Special Focus AR Jul07.88 88 11/6/07 19:58:19
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