here - Beirut Art Center

PRESENT TIME.OURSELVES
A two-year program of exhibitions, events and educational projects
Starting in February 2015, Beirut Art Center will initiate a two-year program of exhibitions, events and
educational projects, under the title: PRESENT TIME.OURSELVES. The works presented in this program
will address issues related to change in the contemporary world .
Beirut Art Center is organizing five exhibitions in 2015, featuring works by John Akomfrah, Penny Siopis,
Zineb Zedira, La Ribot, Jumana Mana, Kamal Aljafari, Xavier Le Roy and Christodoulos Panayiotou. The
exhibitions present practices involving montages of temporalities, “time-based media” and “time-based
arts” such as cinema and dance, positioned in relation to visual arts. Emphasizing time as a medium in
visual art is an additional way to question the exhibition as an itinerary for the gaze, and a space for the
body to circulate. The aim is to achieve a kind of awareness of time: which world do we stand in, from
which historical perspective do we recognize ourselves? There are many aspects to the question of the
present time, such as: on what level do we address the audience, and what definition of art do we want
to activate?
The main theme of Beirut Art Center’s shows, panels, talks and discussions will be contemporary
spaces of political transformations and reflections in Africa and the Middle East. Conversations about
art will echo Mahmoud Darwiche’s statement: “Any past transforms itself instantaneously in collective
knowledge”. Beirut Art Center’s program focus on art as a field for emancipation and discovery, through
experimentation and discussion. Furthermore, the 2015 program privileges dance, more specifically
contemporary dance, while the 2016 program will privilege sound and music in an ongoing dialogue and
interaction with visual arts. The two-year program aims to challenge both the pre-eminence of the eye
and the comfort of the spectacle.
The title of Beirut Art Center’s program, PRESENT TIME.OURSELVES, is inspired by a short narrative
from Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts (1941). Woolf delivers an astonishing evocation of
what remains a recurrent concern in the visual arts: the position of the spectator, and the repartition of
roles between those who organize language and symbols in a spectacle, and those who attend the latter.
Delivered in Woolf’s polyphonic writing, and carrying at once the fluidity and the disparities of cinema
editing, the narrative of this novel centers around a pageant performed in the English countryside,
where the village folk enact the history of England for the gentry. At some point, following the act
of the Victorian period, the spectators are left watching an empty scene; nothing happens. They wait
and wonder until one of them reads the program: “The present time. Ourselves.” A little later, the
actors enter the scene holding mirrors and all kinds of reflective surfaces, on which the spectators see
a shattered reflection of their own image: “Ourselves! Ourselves! (…) Mopping, mowing, whisking,
frisking, the looking glasses darted, flashed, exposed.”
The 2015 program includes La Ribot, Xavier Le Roy (in collaboration with Lebanese dancers), and
Mathilde Monnier.
Marie Muracciole
EXHIBITIONS in 2015
1. UNFINISHED CONVERSATIONS (23 February - 2 May.15)
Present Time.Ourselves begins with an exhibition entitled Unfinished Conversations, including a threechannel installation from JOHN AKOMFRAH based on the writings of British and Caribbean thinker
Stuart Hall (1932 -2014); four films by PENNY SIOPIS and a video installation by ZINEB SEDIRA. Hall’s
assertion that identity is like an unfinished conversation ties in with the discussions about racism and
segregation, but also about cohabitation and exchange. Penny Siopis gives voice to paradoxical figures
from the Apartheid movement; along with Zineb Sedira’s installation Mother Tongue, the question of
“identity” as a negotiation and as a constant exchange with oneself and with others, is put forward.
Conceived as the entry point to Beirut Art Center’s program, this choice underlines the idea that art is, and
must always be, a visual or sensorial experience that leads to the production of language and exchange
in the form of conversation, dialogue and interrogation. Within the framework of this exhibition, BAC
inaugurates the first-floor education space with a platform of round tables, where artists and scholars
will engage in conversations and debates.
2. AFTER CINEMA (22 May - 21 August.15)
Aftercinema will bring together the works of three artists: LA RIBOT, JUMANA MANNA and KAMAL
ALJAFARI, who deal with the role played by cinema in our reality. They share an effort to confront the
projection (in both senses of the word, as a cinema device and as a dream process) with the real. Feature
films become the material for a process that encompasses and extends beyond them. For instance, La
Ribot extracts choreographies from the extras’ behavior and tells their stories. Aljafari will present his
search for the family album of Jaffa’s vanishing Palestinian community in American B movies; Manna is
developing a body of work in the field of sculpting that echoes some of her videos.
3. RETROSPECTIVE (22 September - 10 October.15)
XAVIER LE ROY is a choreographer who does not seek to be defined in the visual art world as a
“performer”. He deals with “performing art” – theatrical practices in general – but stays focused on the
body as his medium and the core of his work. In his Retrospective, Lebanese dancers are performing and
interpreting a specific narrative of dance – crossing body and speech, both collectively and individually.
The space of Beirut Art Center will be transformed into a space for the recollection of memory, and a
discussion of present experiences.
4. Solo show by CHRISTODOULOS PANAYIOTOU (16 October - 9 December.15)
Panayiotou is a Cypriot artist whose work began as a critical acknowledgment of identity processes. The
show here will pursue these investigations further, dealing at once with symbolic processes and both
individual and collective discriminations. Panayiotou›s work raises questions in his own country, that will
be literally “transported” into a Lebanese context, and translated in the installation from one region to
another, from the artist’s own position as an insider to being an outsider, and from an issue of language
to that of the body.
Biographies
John Akomfrah was born in Ghana in 1957 and educated in England from a young age, Akomfrah has
become a cinematic counterpart to such commentators of and contributors to the culture of the Black
diaspora as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Greg Tate and Henry Louis Gates. In doing so, he has continued to
mine the audiovisual archive of the 20th century, re-contextualizing these images not only by selecting
and juxtaposing them but also through the addition of eloquent and allusive text. In Memory Room 451
(1997), Akomfrah speaks of memories become dreams and vice versa. In similar fashion, his films use
found footage to create cinematic poetry and then use this poetry to tell history afresh. Akomfrah is one
of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, which was active between 1982 and 1998, and which
was dedicated towards examining issues of Black British identity through film and media.
Penny Siopis was born in Vryburg, South Africa in 1953. She has an MFA from Rhodes University,
Grahamstown (1976), and is an Honorary Professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape
Town. She works in painting, photography, film/video and installation. Her work since the 1970s has
covered different foci but her interest in what she calls the ‹poetics of vulnerability› characterises all her
explorations, from her earlier engagements with history, memory and migration to her later concerns with
shame, violence and sexuality. She has exhibited widely, both in South Africa and internationally. Solo
exhibitions include the curated show Red: The iconography of colour in the work of Penny Siopis at the
KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009), and Three Essays on Shame at the Freud Museum, London (2005). She
has taken part in the biennales of Venice (South African Pavilion, 2013), Sydney (2010), Johannesburg
(1995 and 1997), Gwangju (1997), Havana (1995) and Venice (1993).
Zineb Sedira was born 1963 in Paris to Algerian parent. Sedira lives in London and works between
Algiers, Paris and London. Zineb’s work is in numerous public collections including the Pompidou
Centre, Paris; Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Museums, Glasgow;
FRAC Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, Marseille; Mathaf – Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Musee
d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Sharjah Art Museum Collection, Sharjah; Tate Collection, London;
The MUMOK – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien Collection, Vienna; Victoria and Albert
Museum, Contemporary Wall Paper Collections, London. Her work can be found in several major public
collections including Deutsch Bank, Tate Britain, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, Pompidou Centre,
Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts Council of England, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow and the Fond
National d›Art Contemporain, Paris. Sedira is founder of aria (artist residency in algiers), a residency
program to support the development of the contemporary art scene in Algeria through international
cross-cultural exchanges and collaborations.
La Ribot was born in Madrid in 1962. She lived in London between 1997 and 2004. Her projects explore
and examine observation through the body, space, image and movement. In 1995, she founded the
association UVI-La Inesperada, designed to promote research projects and workshops on avant-garde
dance. In 1998 she was nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for plastic arts. In 2003 she
presented Panoramix in London, Madrid and Paris. She taught at the HEAD (Geneva University of Art
and Design) until 2008. After achieving international recognition, in 2008 she opened up her work
to other forms of artistic encounter in partnership with the French choreographer Mathilde Monnier,
and in a video she made with Cristina Hoyos. With Llámame Mariachi (2009) she continued her video
investigation using her earlier works.
Jumana Manna was born in 1987 in the US, but grew up in Jerusalem and studied at the Bezalel
Academy of Arts and Design and the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. Her works, such as Familiar,
reflect on human identity in relation to gender and personality as well as collective identity, for example
concerning the conflict ridden situation of the Palestinian population. Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010),
comments on the lives of young men in occupied East Jerusalem as a lost generation paralysed by
frustration.
Kamal AlJafari is a graduate of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, where he received the visual
arts award of the city of Cologne in 2004. His films include The Roof (2006), which won the Best
International Award at the Images Festival in Toronto, and Port of Memory (2009), which received the
Prix Louis Marcorelles. He was a featured artist at the 2009 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, and in 20092010 was the Benjamin White Whitney fellow at Harvard University. In 2013 he received the art medal
of the state Rio Grande do Sul Brazil.
Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and
has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has performed with diverse companies and
choreographers. From 1996 to 2003, he was artist-in-residence at the Podewil in Berlin. In 2007- 2008
he was “Associated Artist”at Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier, France. In 2010, Le Roy
was an Artist in Residence fellow at the MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology (Cambridge, MA).
Through his solo works such as Self Unfinished (1998) and Product of Circumstances (1999), he has
opened new perspectives in the field of choreographic art. His latest works such as the solo Le Sacre du
Printemps (2007), the group piece low pieces (2011), and works for exhibition spaces such as production
(2011) created together with Mårten Spångberg, «untitled» 2012 for the exhibition 12 Rooms and
Retrospective first realized in 2012 at the Tapiès Foundation-Barcelona, produce situations that explore
the relationships between spectacors/visitors/performers and the production of subjectivities.
Christodoulos Panayiotou was born in 1978 in Limassol, Cyprus. He is an internationally acclaimed
artist whose wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in
the visual records of history and time. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at Spring Workshop,
Hong Kong, China; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg; CCA
Kitakyushu, Japan; Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny, France; Museum of Contemporary Art,
St. Louis, USA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland and
Cubitt, London, UK. He participated in major international survey exhibitions, including the 8th Berlin
Biennale; 7th Liverpool Biennial; Documenta 13, Kassel; 6th Taipei Biennale and Busan Biennale 2008.
His work was also shown in a number of museum exhibitions including: Museion, Bolzano, Italy; Migros
Museum, Zürich, Switzerland; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA; Joan
Miro Foundation, Barcelona, Spain; Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Bonniers Konsthall,
Stockholm, Sweden; Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA; Ashkal Alwan Center for Contemporary Arts,
Beirut, Lebanon; Artist Space, New York, USA, MoCA Miami, USA. He was the recipient of The Future of
Europe Prize in 2010 and the DESTE Prize in 2005.