In Conversation with Ginane Makki Bacho

War, refugees, mass migration – these topics are torn from current world headlines, seemingly endless man-instigated catastrophes that are tearing apart nations and irrevocably changing the essence of contemporary civilization.

These urgent matters are at the very core of Ginane Makki Bacho’s work. The Lebanese artist, who’s been working for over four decades, recently unveiled a heartbreaking exhibit about migration at Agial Art Gallery in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood. The timeliness and immediacy of her work is undeniable: hundreds of toy-size figures welded out of scrap metal represent families with children as they desperately march toward freedom – or perhaps as they run away from the hopelessness of their lives. The exhibit, “Interminable Seasons of Migration,” at first appears to represent the current Syrian refugee crisis, but nothing is ever quite as simple in Makki Bacho’s art.

“My figurines came as a response to an invasion – the invasion by ISIS [of Syria and Iraq], but it could have been any invasion,” says the artist, explaining how her emotional figurines reflect something global and perhaps even timeless. “First the Palestinians became refugees, then us, the Lebanese,” she says, “and now the Syrians. But you also have refugees from Rwanda in Africa, and the refugees coming to America, like Cubans and Mexicans. So it’s not just about the Syrians – it’s about all people fleeing their homes. It’s something that we as human beings cannot ignore.”

Prior to her most recent show at Agial, Makki Bacho held a solo exhibit in 2016, “Civilization,” at Saleh Barakat Gallery in Clemenceau. “Civilization” was the precursor to “Interminable Seasons of Migration,” and it came about as a very personal response to the horrors perpetrated by ISIS. “First I was in complete denial,” she says. “People in cages, people getting burned, selling off women, the crimes of ISIS. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.” So she started sculpting cages. “It became an obsession, I was working like crazy day and night,” Makki Bacho says. “The motorcycles ahead of the convoys, then tanks. I saw beheadings and I replicated them. They needed to be in quantity, in big numbers. Repetition was necessary for me to convey the idea of the war and of the invasion.”

To create her sculptures, the artist went to the scrapyards in Ouzai, south of Beirut, where she picked up discarded metal objects. Back in her studio, which is in the same building as her home in Jnah, she sculpted the disused metal into tanks, migrants floating away on boats, prisoners in orange suits held captive in cages and armed mercenaries driving trucks across the desert, in a dramatic re-enactment of the ISIS invasion of Arab lands in 2014. “I was taking my revenge and taking out my anger,” Makki Bacho says. “It was a catharsis for me, defying the enemy by creating these testaments to war.” As for the title of the exhibit, the intent was sarcastic, but also a reflection of the material used to create the work. “Scraps of civilization. That’s where we’re at,” she says.

Now in her 70s, Makki Bacho devotes much of her life to art. In addition to her Jnah studio, where she creates her sculptures, she has another studio in Corniche el Mazraa where she paints and produces her etchings. She graduated from the Lebanese American University (LAU) in 1982 and has been working as an artist ever since. While she had her first major solo exhibit in 1983 at the university – striking sculptures made out of bombshells – her first foray into the art world was in 1978, when she showed (and sold) her etchings during Hamra’s Makhoul Festival.

Reflecting on a lifetime of work, and constant moves from her native Lebanon to France, Kuwait, the United States and then back to Lebanon again, Makki Bacho hopes that she’s been able to communicate one overarching message through her phenomenal artistic output: “Stop the war. All of our lives have been wasted because of war. I’m for peace wherever I go. All for peace.”