WALID SADEK IN CONVERSATION WITH BAVAND BEHPOOR

APPEARANCE OF IMAGES AS DISASTER

Born in 1966, Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. His early work investigates the violent legacies of the Lebanese civil war as partially and inadequately experienced by a young Christian-born Lebanese: Once I Dreamt I was the Phoenix (1995); Half-Man (1995); Home Play (1996); The Last Days of Summer (1997). He later began to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability: A Matter of Words (2002); From Excavation to Dispersion: Configurations of Installation Art in Post-War Lebanon (2003); The Acquisition of Death: the Ends of Art and Dwelling in Lebanon (2004). His recent written work endeavours to structure a theory for a postwar society disinclined to resume normative living: From Image to Corpse (2006); Place at Last (2007); Seeing Rude and Erudite (2007); PeddlingTime when Standing Still: Art Remains and the Globalization That Was (forthcoming, 2011). Concomitantly, a number of art installations propose a poetics for a social experience governed by uneasy contiguity with the remnants and consequences of violence: Love is Blind (2006); Knowledge of the Expelled (2007); Mourning in the Presence of the Corpse (2007); On Learning to See Less (2009); Place at Last (2010); Kozo Okamoto Resides in Greater Beirut (2010). Walid Sadek is associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.

Bavand Behpoor: How do you find the status of contemporary art in Lebanon? How critical are you of the dominant atmosphere of the art scene in Beirut? Walid Sadik: Already in 2001, at a time when the work of post-Taif Lebanese artists was being shown worldwide, it was possible to remark that the aftermath of civil-war can raise a few chosen individuals onto the stage of globalisation just as it can level the lives of most into an uncertain and cold existence. Acquiring the label of post-civil war artist seemed like a dependable means by which to graduate from the tenuous position of a survivor to the privileged position of a reliable onlooker who stands astride the wreckage and addresses the world. No longer part of the wreckage or governed by the extended and damaged time of a civil-war, such an artist gladly appropriates the responsibility of speaking for others and accordingly enters the coveted circuit of international exhibitions. Such artists, it must be said, did not betray the war they lived or accompanied nor should they be faulted for venality. Rather, they performed what was probably unavoidable: to provide an accessible inventory for a convoluted war at a time when a return to the world of normality seemed possible for the Lebanese. Throughout the 1990s various artworks, films and plays with widely divergent aesthetics and political leanings found attentive international audiences and landed extended passes into a global art circuit. And yet, the tense and lingering interface provoked in Beirut, for instance, between Ghassan Salhabs film Beyrouth Fantme (1998), which grapples with the absences that dwell in civil-war survivors and Ziad Doueiris film West Beirut (1998), which weaves a light fable of a war that seems to have happened long ago to folks who may resemble our parents, is totally lost when both are shown abroad. By 2003, one could speak of an inflation concerning contemporary Lebanese art. The contradictions were conspicuous. Lebanese art was marking the calendar of the international art circuit at a time when the socio-political situation in the country was regressing alarmingly. Artists, it seemed, could do nothing else except carry on the trend of

addressing

and

divulging

to

an

international

audience.

Following the assassination of Rafic Hariri on the 14th of February 2005 and then later during and after the attempted Israeli annihilation of Hizb Allah in Lebanon in summer of 2006, the local and regional conditions which had propelled these artists into the circuits of a global art market came tumbling down: first, the centrality of the capital Beirut, which stood as their ostensible referent and which nourished their critiques and claims, was severely undone. Second, the pax Hariri which had maintained the myth of an economic growth during the 1990s by brokering a tense but operative truce with the military force of Hizb Allah in south Lebanon was annulled. Even if the global art market, ever eager for information and events, continues to host the work of Lebanese artists, it is nevertheless crucial to state that it does so against a very different background: when traveling, Lebanese artists do so with a local landslide not far behind. Their peregrinations are decelerated by a land awash in violent geopolitical struggles. In the least, these artists now have to grapple with the thickness of a land in disarray, of places they can no longer own as an amenable referent to their work nor disavow and without which pursue their careers; damaged places tugging at their sleeves.

Considering the complex history of Lebanon and the various factors influencing Lebanese Identity (if you agree with the use of such a term), has contemporary art in Lebanon responded in some way to the notion of Collective Memory? How do you find the relation between this history (your own reading) and what collective memory thinks of it? A civil-war once begun does not end. Its corrosive consequences gnaw at every node of what could constitute a social collectivity and perhaps most destructively at that which societies often hold on to and endearingly call Collective Memory. I came to such a blunt recognition through a work titled The Last Days of Summer which I presented in 1997. During the preparations I revisited an early chapter of the Lebanese civil-war when the predominantly Christian suburb of Hazmieh wherein I was raised, was engaged, with other like suburbs, in what was called during that summer of 1976 an effort to cleanse the Christian East Beirut from all Palestinian refugee camps. Among those targeted camps was the neighboring camp of Tel el Zaatar. In an attempt to understand the impossibility of a dialogue then and an ongoing reluctance to engage in a critical reading of the violent past, I sought to reconstruct one particular register of that violence which pitted my home town with Tel el Zaatar. I went around asking family members, neighbors and school friends old enough to have lived the siege of Tel al Zaatar, of what they remembered of anti-Palestinian and anti-Left songs we used to sing and which carried demeaning and extremely violent lyrics put to melodies of popular songs by renowned Lebanese singers such as Fairouz and Wadil el Safi. I was able to re-constitute the lyrics of 13 of these songs and of them make an empty cassette-tape which carried a pamphlet with the above mentioned lyrics headed with the titles of the original songs. I assumed that, if at least my age or older, one could read those lyrics and re-enact or become complicit again with this expression of a collective belongingness which is simultaneously an exclusionary act of violence. Perhaps more importantly, in reconstituting a past which does not pass, I was encountering the violence of what in Lebanon is operatively my own identitarian construction; an identity which is produced by clear demarcations and therefore has an effect of felicity on those who continue to abide by it. It is therefore arguable that in Lebanon identity and consequently concepts such as collective

memory are always exclusionary and violent and therefore must be critiqued and unpacked. But to do so artists have to begin by recognizing that they are in part structured by such identities.

Do you find anything local about your particular and simultaneous use of the visual and the literary? Does your work intend to correspond to this in a conscious or unconscious way? My work is an attempt to participate in the making of the visible. Living in this region wherein an endlessly waning Arab world aimlessly and self-destructively struggles against an enforced and cynical Middle East, I came to perceive the appearance of images as a sign of imminent disaster. When in images we appear we do so as corpses and when images we try develop we often fall within sets of visualities that bypass the task of toiling at the making of the visible. In other words, our images are eager to acquire and follow a script while the world we live in is forsaken without one. If in my work the visual image is discarded, it is not because of any withdrawal of tradition nor is it due to an inconoclastic or even aniconic thinking process. Rather, in my attempt at participating in the act of representation, I have made a number of choices which lend my work an aesthetic of the preface. I suppose that I am deeply invested in the prefatory organisation of what could become an image. But the latter I offer to the other as something to do as I also offer it to myself. And that is exactly what Barthel Bruyn the Elder (1493-1555) did when he painted a vanitas still-life on the back of a portrait of the young JaneLoyse Tissier. It is only fitting that today we only know the back of the painting while the face of the girl is as many as those eager to make an image or none for those who linger in the making, even if, or perhaps precisely because, this lingering is close to death and far from disaster.