Out of time and against modernity
ARTS & CULTURE AGENDA
DANCE
LE BAN O N
‘Mudejar’ UNESCO Palace, UNESCO Street, Verdun March 19, 8 p.m.
01-850-013 Spanish dancer and choreographer Miguel Angel Berna performs this dance and castanet show that deals with the theme of the true self. LECTURE
‘Floating Music’ American University of Beirut, Hamra, West Hall March 15, 6:30 p.m.
01-752-000 The Austrian rock star Hubert von Goisern (aka Hubert Achleitner) talks about his adventures sailing down the Danube River on a cargo ship he calls a “floating musical singing village.” MUSIC
‘Mitrades the Great’ Hotel Al-Bustan, Beit Mery March 17, 8:30 p.m.
01-752-000 The Al-Bustan Festival continues with a performance of Mozart’s fourth opera, backed by the Tblisi State Opera Chamber Orchestra. THEATER
‘Youssef al-Hikaya’ Dawar al-SHAMS, Tayouneh March 15-17, 7 p.m.
01-381-290 The 50 Days 50 Years festival continues with this play written, directed and performed by Charbel Aoun. It promises to be a theatrical mingling of reality and fantasy that addresses the fears, thinking and illusions of young men and women. The performance will be preceded by film screenings and also followed by a concert. ART
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Jamil Molaeb’s latest exhibition finds him beating a retreat to the primitive and the pure
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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
EIRUT: In an intriguing new essay on revolutions in the Middle East, the sociologist Jon Rich argues that due to the export of conflicts from Europe, the region “has been the garbage dump of Western modernity since its inception.” The Arab world is passing through a period of upheaval, Rich suggests, because it is dealing with problems that European democracies have pushed over the edges of their own borders. Painter Jamil Molaeb seems to agree, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Just as Paul Gauguin helped give birth to modern art by paradoxically turning his back on Western progress and devoting his life and work to dubious notions of primitivism and purity in Tahiti, Molaeb has closed his eyes on the concrete chaos of contemporary life to pursue more elusive and idealized visions of the world. Though loosely inspired by Morocco, these appear totally out of time. “What is modern art?” Molaeb asks, screwing his face into a pained expression. “I’m confused. I need to come back to my body. My paintings come back to nature. They come back to the primitive. Modernity killed naiveté. It killed nature. I don’t know what happened. Now people live in an instant. They live inside their perception of time.” “The Present of Yesterday and Today,” Molaeb’s latest exhibition at Galerie Janine Rubeiz in Raouche, owes a sizable debt to Gauguin’s Tahitian women, as well as to Cézanne’s bathers and Picasso’s desmoiselles. The show includes some two dozen paintings of women and birds. The women are arranged in various groups – anywhere from three to thirty – selling flowers, cleaning fish, balancing earthenware pots on their heads and drying each other’s hair. The birds, meanwhile, converge in patterns of different densities, some Special to The Daily Star
04-715-500 Zohrab presents his canvases and religious frescos that have decorated Lebanese and international churches.
sparsely inhabiting the branches of a stylized tree, others squeezed in to cover the entire surface. Two of the bird pictures are ominously paired up, depicting one bird hanging from fish hooks, the other flopped dead on its side. Although the dominant colors are those of sun-browned skin and crisp white clothes, the show rumbles from a rosy terra cotta to a melancholy blue. The backgrounds are primarily monochromatic, with broad strokes alluding to architecture as they emulate the forms of the figures – a series of arches curve over the bodies of three seated women, for example. Only rarely does a horizon line dash across the canvas. The sense of space created in each picture is shallow without feeling claustrophobically pressed. The only nod to modern life is a single painting of a cityscape titled “Fez,” a dazzling pile of expressive urbanism towering two meters high. Molaeb dismisses the work with a scoff and a scowl.
“I don’t know why everyone likes this one,” he says. “I ask myself, why? Maybe it’s because anyone could do it.” After a moment’s thought, he adds, “Scratch that. When I went to Fez, I went to the market and I felt I was coming back to my childhood. I am happy to come back and sketch what my hand was unable to do before. Then I am ready to express myself and draw what I love and what I see and what I feel.” Molaeb is one of Lebanon’s most prodigious painters, mounting solo exhibitions roughly every other year since the early 1970s. The son of a housepainter who harbored musical ambitions, Molaeb devoted his life to art with a fierceness his father never managed. A lucky break landed him at the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts at a time when blockbuster talents such as Shafic Abboud, Aref Rayyes and Amine al-Bacha were teaching there. A scholarship took him to Algeria. Graduate school situated him in the U.S., where he dabbled in computer art
and wrote seven as yet unpublished works of literature. What Molaeb is best known for, however, is both the brashness with which he experiments with different media – from stone sculptures to woodcuts, gouaches, acrylics and mosaics – and the sensitivity he lends to tortured works on Lebanon’s troubles, such as the 1977 book of drawings entitled “Diary of the Civil War.” These days, Molaeb says he is sticking to oil paintings. Five days after the opening of “The Present of Yesterday and Today,” he also re-hung half of the exhibition – an unusual move – removing a series of abstractions and leaving only explicitly figurative works. “I took down the abstract paintings,” he says. “To do a figurative show is more interesting for me in this time. I have done a lot of abstractions before. Now I want to make abstractions in the figure. “This is the first time I do a pure oil painting exhibition, with no other ele-
ments. This is the only material for me now. Oil painting made me relax,” he explains, “knowing I had found the medium in which I can express myself. Right now, at least, because I change. I’m not sure I’ve arrived at what I need to express exactly. I’m not sure I’ve found what I need to fill up my life. “I paint every day in the same way I eat and drink and sleep every day. I want to make painting an extension of my body. You have limited time in life. A tree has more time than you do. You can continue your time with your touch on a canvas. You can extend your life or reincarnate yourself in some way or some form, whether it’s music or poetry or painting or photography. You can fix yourself in some way. You can register your voice.”
Farhadian, presently up at Tehran’s Mah Art Gallery, is redolent of nostalgia. These works do not express a clear longing to return to the past but, rather, to a condition that the artist has never himself had an opportunity to experience. His paintings take as their subject representations of historic Tehran buildings, set among historical or contemporary figures. Spectators may find people playing golf or bowling within these cityscapes, a combination that gives the work an otherworldly aspect.
These structures have played an important role in the artist’s life, forming a part of his personal history and that of his generation. Raised within a traditional family, Farhadian was also in a position to experience the vibrant (somehow forgotten) culture of these parts of Tehran. Erected in the past century, landmarks like Baharestan Square, Qasr Prison, Khiaban Gate and Eshrat Abad Palace/Prison have all recently been invested with new meaning.
These buildings and crossroads have borne witness to almost all Tehran’s important socio-historical changes – from the nationalist struggle to its suppression and the rebirth of so-called Islamic virtues, from Reza Shah’s banning of the hijab to the imposition of the hijab by Islamic governments. Farhadian’s renderings of these structures assemble their contradictory and paradoxical meanings together to form a new world. This world, whose visual specifics seem totally different from that of the artist’s experience, could be an alternate universe. The buildings and squares painted here seem familiar but the colors of his sky and earth are those of a dream world. In one work, a volcano erupts in the background – though the Iranian volcano in question has been inactive for thousands of years. Wild plants surround one famous building, while a lion sits on a storm-felled tree. Farhadian’s alternate universe sometimes evokes an image of Armageddon and the ghostly figures wandering his streets suggest that all these images are simply an afterimage, abandoned by the city’s memory. For Tehran residents, “Baharestan” recalls one of the city’s oldest districts, but this is one of many and varied historical and linguistic references. Literally, it means “The Land of Spring.” In Iranian literature it refers to lost Eden. Baharestan is also the name of a jewel-encrusted carpet woven of gold and silver, measuring 140x27 meters, that dated from the Sassanid era. During the Arab invasion and the conquest of the Sassanid Empire, this carpet was dismembered, its shards distributed to Arab soldiers as booty. Because of this incident, “Baharestan” is equated with a point of no return. The conquest of the Sassanid Empire is equated with the rise of the Islamic Empire, reinforced through changes in the alphabet and calendar. Even if all the pieces of the dismembered carpet were reassembled,
Baharestan would remain beyond recognition because the context in which it was woven has changed. Farhadian’s “Baharestan” series works along similar principles. The artist knows that the story of his homeland has passed a point of no return. The history is irreversible. By using elements from past, present and the possible future, he creates an alternate universe which, though comprised of known elements, is completely different from our world. Not wholly good or bad, the impossibility of Baharestan makes it something to be longed-for. There resides the nostalgic agony. “Baharestan” may be compared to the works of renowned Iranian film and television director Ali Hatami. Replete with stories from the last century of Iranian history, Hatami’s oeuvre is fixated upon how there can be no return; all his movies are just a sterilized ambition to return to his ideal context. Aware of these parallels between Hatami’s work and his own, Farhadian chose the soundtrack of Hatami’s renowned television series “Hezardastan,” composed by Morteza Hannaneh, to accompany the exhibit. About two decades ago Iranian national television used to broadcast this tune every week. Upon hearing the theme, then, Farhadian’s audience is immediately thrust into a state of nostalgia for this period. Another more obvious point linking Farhadian’s works and Hatami’s movies is the period that “Hezardastan” depicted, which the buildings in these paintings strongly evoke. “Baharestan” is a bricolage of time and place. It breaks historical periods into thousands of pieces and combines them to make a new whole. This new world is both familiar and unfamiliar, an interstitial condition in which, perhaps, the Baharestan carpet is still intact.
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EHRAN: Derived from the Greek words for “return” (nostos) and “suffering” (algos), “nostalgia” most obviously evokes the painful longing for an impossible return Odysseus felt after departing Ithaca. “Baharestan,” the latest series of paintings by young Iranian artist Mehdi
‘Boarding House’ UNESCO Palace, UNESCO Street, Verdun Until March 31
01-499-808 The Lebanese Association of SOS Children’s Villages presents Roger Ballen’s avantgarde photos, as part of a project that aims to use art to agitate for children’s rights.
‘Francois Rabelais-Fabien Cerredo: The horrible life of the giant Gargantua’ Villa Audi, Charles Malek Avenue, Achrafieh Until April 1
01-200-445 In association with the French Cultural Center, this exhibit displays a series of paintings by the late Argentinean artist Fabien Cerredo, dedicated to French writer Francois Rabelais’ novel “Gargantua.”
Laurent Corvaisier French Cultural Center, Damascus Street, Achrafieh Until March 31
01-420-200 As part of the French Cultural Center’s “Francophone Month,” French painter and illustrator Laurent Corvaisier exhibits his artwork. He will also present several artistic workshops for children.
Just a thought The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) Italian intellectual
Jamil Molaeb’s “The Present of Yesterday and Tomorrow” is one view at Galerie Janine Rubeiz in Raouche through March 23. For more information, please call 01-868 290 or visit www.galeriejaninerubeiz.com
‘Baharestan’: Longing to return, but to where? Special to The Daily Star
Until March 23
“Bahara,” 2009, 155x285 cm, oil on canvas.
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By Ali Ettehad
‘River of God’ Surface Libre Gallery, Dadour Gardens, Jal al-Dib
THE DAILY STAR monday, march 14, 2011
Photo courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz
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One of the works from Farhadian’s “Baharestan” series.
Mehdi Farhadian’s “Baharestan” series is on show of Mah Art Gallery until Persian New Year, Nowrooz.
Afghanistan, U.N. against rebuilding Buddha Saudia Arabia, Bahrain among record By Edith M. Lederer
UNITED NATIONS: UNESCO’s assistant chief has said the U.N. culture agency and the Afghan government are against the reconstruction of one of two giant 1,500-year-old Buddha statues in central Afghanistan dynamited by the Taliban 10 years ago. UNESCO assistant director-general for culture Francesco Bandarin said the agency has asked for a feasibility study for reconstructing the smaller Buddha, which several German scientists have been promoting and will carry out. Bandarin told a briefing that the study “doesn’t change our position on the reconstruction, which we think is not feasible” and would unnecessarily divert resources from other priorities Associated Press
at the UNESCO world heritage site in the Bamiyan Valley. Standing 54 meters and 38 meters tall respectively, the two statues were chiseled about 400 meters apart into a cliff face teeming with cave shrines and paintings about 1,500 years ago when Bamiyan was a major Buddhist center. The Taliban dynamited the giant Buddhas in March 2001, deeming them idolatrous and anti-Muslim, prompting a worldwide outcry. Since the fall of the Taliban regime in November 2001, Bandarin said the niches where the Buddhas stood have been stabilized and 20-30 percent of the giant Buddha and 40-50 percent of the smaller Buddha have been recovered. “But this material doesn’t have any shape,” he said. “It’s just pieces of rock … because the statue was actually carved, and then it was plastered.
The plaster is dust, but the plaster was giving the shape.” At a meeting last week of the International Committee for Bamiyan at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, Bandarin said there was “complete agreement” among the experts that it isn’t possible to reconstruct the great Buddha but there was disagreement on the smaller Buddha. Even though there are more pieces of the smaller Budhha, he said, “there are significant doubts that a reconstruction is possible because reconstruction will require a lot of integrations what at the end will result in a fake.” Afghanistan’s Culture Minister Makhdoom Raheem attended the meeting, Bandarin said, and was “quite in agreement with us because they see the need to focus on things which are essential.
88 countries in 2011 Venice Biennale
ROME: Saudi Arabia and Bahrain will be among the record 88 countries scheduled to take part in the Venice Biennale contemporary art festival this year, which will include top artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Angel Vergara and Cindy Sherman. The biennale, which first opened in 1895, will start on June 1 and run until November. This is the first time national pavilions from Andorra, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Haiti and Saudi Arabia will be included in the festival. The Democratic Republic of Congo and India, which have not taken part since 1968 and 1980 respectively, will also be taking part in a series of exhibitions and shows. “The biennale is a place of pilgrimage for the whole world,” director
Paolo Baratta told reporters in Rome Friday, adding that the total cost of the festival this year was $18 million. The Biennale is known for its often provocative shows. At the last show in 2009, Chechen artist Andrei Molodkin’s work used blood donated by Russian soldiers who fought in Chechnya. At this year’s show the national pavilion of the U.S. will feature Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla and the Chinese one will contain works by Yuan Gong, Pan Gongkai, Liang Yuanwei, Yang Maoyuan and Cai Zhisong. Japan will be represented by Tabaimo. Mecca-born Shadia Alem, who has works in France, Ireland, South Africa and South Korea, will exhibit in Saudi Arabia’s pavilion. – AFP