Sep 14 2012

Home Workspace Program 2011–2012: Open Studios

by Nadia al-Issa

Launched in 2011 by the Lebanese art association Ashkal Alwan, the Home Workspace Program (HWP) is an annual non-academic, non-degree granting educational initiative for emerging artists and cultural practitioners from Lebanon, the neighboring regions and the wider world. Dedicated to critical artistic research, practice and production, HWP has introduced a revolutionary, interdisciplinary approach in art education to the Arab world. Located in the industrial neighborhood of Jisr El Wati, the 2,000-meter, multipurpose facility (Home Workspace) that houses the program includes production and editing studios, performance spaces, auditoriums and a multimedia library.

HWP is a 10-month program that engages around 15 participants and is led by a rotating Resident Professor (RP) each year. The curriculum, set by the RP, comprises of lectures, workshops, seminars and studio courses, with a thematic focus, conducted by the RP as well as visiting artists, writers, filmmakers and curators.

The 2011–12 inaugural program was headed by RP Emily Jacir, an internationally renowned Palestinian artist whose video, photography, intervention, installation, performance and sound work deals with issues of mobility (forced or voluntary), resistance, repressed historical narratives and the logic of the archive. The 2011–12 HWP focused on insurgencies, uprisings, legacies of post-colonialism, sites of trauma, repressed histories, tricksters, troubadours and strategies of dissent. Visiting professors have included: Franco Berardi, Alfredo Jaar, Willie Doherty, Hito Steyerl, Cesare Pietroiusti, Hassan Khan, Lina Saneh, Kamran Rastegar, Tony Chakar, Rami Daher, Jean Fisher, Akram Zaatari and Mirene Arsanios.

Taking the form of an exhibition accompanied by a program of screenings and performances, the Open Studios presented the work of the inaugural program’s 12 participants at the Home Workspace. The Open Studios was the culmination of the 2011–12 curriculum and occurred on July 18–31, 2012. The participants were: Mohamed Abdelkarim, Noor Abu Arafeh, Roy Dib, Maria Elena Fantoni, Sarah Farahat, Raphael Fleuriet, Saba Innab, Samar Kanafani, Mahmoud Khaled, Joe Namy, Haig Papazian and Tamara al Samerraei.

Ranging in their interests from representations of masculinity, violence and place to issues of absence and presence, the works as a whole explored processes—particularly processes of thinking—and attempted to unravel them by identifying or magnifying fissures between expectations and reality. Although of disparate quality, the presented projects hinted of promise for the participants, particularly in the works’ conceptualization, as well as the program’s potential for reinvigorating the arts scene in Lebanon.

All images, unless otherwise noted, are courtesy Houssam Mchaiemch.

Mohamed Abdelkarim’s video, The Third Thing, which is part of the artist’s larger project, Travel Literature, uses a staged scenario of conflict to deal with perceptions of violence, particularly as they pertain to the context of Beirut, and open up new approaches for its rethinking.

Image courtesy the artist.

Noor Abu Arafeh’s multimedia installation, And the Last Shall Be First, experiments with erasure, considering its transformative effect on an impacted element’s characteristic features.

Image courtesy the artist.

Roy Dib’s two-channel video, Objects in a Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, juxtaposes images and sounds of a city to locate the schism between the imagined and the concrete.

Maria Elena Fantoni’s interest lies in the impact of time on matter. The mixed-media installation Eating Einstein, Three Houses, Everything That Was Inside… contemplates matter’s permanence and its disappearance in one form and subsequent emergence in another. What Would You See If Your Eyes Were Underground surveys issues of perpetuity through the decay of family photographs, which were recovered from a demolished house and buried underground by Fantoni for a month and a half.

Sarah Farahat’s work is infused with activism and gives voice to the marginalized. Beirut Postcard Project proposes alternative souvenir photographs of the city. A Taste of Ethiopia: Featuring Rahel Zegeye addresses the dehumanization of migrant labor in Lebanon and invites guests to share and appreciate a meal prepared by Ethiopian chef and activist Rahel at a popular local restaurant.

Image courtesy Tawlet Restaurant.

Raphael Fleuriet’s multimedia performance, Ignis Fatuus, unfolds as a conversation between the artist and up to three guests, which revolves around the artist’s experience in the Homeworks Space Program.

Mahmoud Khaled interrogates notions of masculinity, strength and vulnerability. Untitled (Dream) is a composite image of photographs of rookie bullfighters training in Spain, which underscores the performative and self-sacrificial or effacing expectation of the sport. Proposal for a Romantic Sculpture is a video embedded within a sculpture of a male protagonist who has the words Ne Me Quitte Pas (“Do Not Leave Me”) tattooed on his body—a startling contrast between the associations of toughness in the act and weakness in the statement. At Five in the Afternoon is a video message from one lover to another that openly and defenselessly confesses his innermost fears about intimacy.

Image courtesy the artist.

Haig Papazian’s installation of videos and drawings, Heroes of a Transitional Time, departs from historical depictions of the archetypal male, hero and martyr within Lebanon’s Armenian community, identifying ruptures through which to understand the flawed logic of hero-making. These flaws are embodied by the outdated, aestheticized and Sisyphean qualities of the renditions of heroism performed by Papazian’s actors.

Samar Kanafani’s Place Undone is a mixed-media installation that attempts to give visual form to the means through which we comprehend our metamorphosing environment and the sites we occupy and leave behind. The installation alludes to a corner of the Home Workspace and its developing surroundings.

Saba Innab’s How to Build Without a Land?—which references the plight of the Palestinians—questions the potentially interdependent relationship between construction, land and the durability of both through time, upturning notions of place, dwelling and permanence. In a project called Untitled, the frontiers of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, along with Palestine, are laid out as an abstract design that reflect upon instituted readings and perceptions of space—its beginning, end and division—and the tools through which we understand them. In another display from Untitled, the space within a drawn circle gradually disappears through a series of illustrations and recalculations of its surface area; diminishing concentric squares and circles are sketched within the original circle, and the leftover space between them are subtracted until the area in focus approaches naught. Accompanying the display is Innab’s text on the wall, which are a poetic play on the Arabic root for the word “dwell” and its extractions.

Joe Namy’s digital prints, Constellations, illustrate instruments from musical history—and, by extension, the political, economic and social history that they tell of—as a testament to what has passed, and as a body with which to chronicle the future. (A(versions is a vinyl of a curated selection of musical pieces by contributors, which sample source music or sounds in an investigation of appropriation and re-contextualization. Auto-Synthetic Phenomenon is a sound installation dedicated to the synthesizer and its ubiquitous presence in the Beirut soundscape by way of the automobile.

Tamara al-Samarraei’s three works on display, a mixed-media on paper work entitled Wall Paper (Tribute to Basma al-Khatib and Roald Dahl), the digital print Untitled and multimedia installation Waiting Room (Act III), conceal, underlay, dissolve and insinuate personal images, creating from absence an expressive tool.

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