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Timeless matters of life and death
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May 11, 2013 12:04 AM
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BEIRUT: Lamia Joreige hasn’t had a solo show in Lebanon for six long years. Nearly a decade has passed since she last shared her paintings with the world. None of the galleries she previously worked with (Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Espace Kettaneh-Kunigk) exist today in precisely the same form...
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Choucair celebrated at Tate Modern
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April 27, 2013 12:11 AM
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LONDON: In the spring of 1951, the Lebanese ambassador to France ducked into a Paris gallery to see the debut exhibition of a young artist from Beirut. At the time, Ahmad Daouk was between two stints as prime minister: the first under the French Mandate, the second for just three months under...
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A compulsion to write born out of prison
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April 17, 2013 12:03 AM
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BEIRUT: The Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim published his first and most powerful novel, “Tilka al-Raaiha (That Smell),” when he was just 29 years old, and some 24 months out of prison. That was in 1966. In the nearly five decades since, the book has been banned, pulped, censored,...
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Time has passed, but nothing has changed
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April 05, 2013 12:03 AM
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BEIRUT: Depending who you talk to, it was a crisis, a disturbance, an insurrection, or a revolution. It began with trouble in Tripoli. Soon, people were blowing up bridges and blocking roads. Bombs were tearing through neighborhoods all over Beirut.Men, arms, and ammunitions flushed through the...
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Restoration Drama
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March 30, 2013 12:02 AM
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SHARJAH: The artist Simon Fujiwara has filled a floor of a former bank building in Sharjah with an elaborate installation of photographs, random papers, receipts, a folding ruler, an uncapped highlighter, plastic cups, a water bottle, white gloves, push pins, yarn, sand, a pile of rocks and a...
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Dreams of the past, memories for the future
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March 16, 2013 12:01 AM
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BEIRUT: Late last month, the Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi gave a reading at the Mosaic Rooms in London with one of his most committed translators, André Naffis-Sahely. Laâbi is a national treasure and one of the most respected writers in the Arab world, but he remains...
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Shooting stars, Nile sludge
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February 22, 2013 12:01 AM
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BEIRUT: In her quick and supple literary debut, “The Girl Who Fell to Earth,” the writer and filmmaker Sophia al-Maria maps out her story like an astronomer picking her way through stars in the night sky. Maria names each of her memoir’s brisk 21 chapters for a single point in a...
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Invisible narratives, impossible journeys
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February 16, 2013 12:09 AM
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BEIRUT: The Beirut Art Center’s commitment to contemporary art hasn’t faltered in its first years of existence, but one of its current exhibitions, among its strongest, draws on a story that’s over 2000 years old. According to the soldier-writer Xenophon, author of a seven-book...
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Love and violence on the edges of Istanbul
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January 18, 2013 12:05 AM
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BEIRUT: In the seven years since he won the Nobel Prize for literature, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk has made the news mostly for two books he published on either side of a museum opening in Istanbul. For a writer renowned for bold public statements on behalf of the Armenians and Kurds killed in...
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The web of intrigue about Walid Raad
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January 08, 2013 12:02 AM
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BEIRUT: Walid Raad’s second-ever solo exhibition in Beirut covers a wild range of incongruous subjects and disparate art forms. Grouped into six different clusters of work, the show moves from an elaborate assassination plot to an improbable retirement fund, from high stakes finance to...
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2012: A roller-coaster ride of a year
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December 28, 2012 12:05 AM
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BEIRUT: The past 12 months were nothing if not confusing for advocates of modern and contemporary art in the Lebanese capital. On one hand, the year witnessed major exhibitions of historically significant work by Goya at Villa Audi, Gerhard Richter at the Beirut Art Center and Andy Warhol at Q...
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Three artworks in an empty gallery
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December 08, 2012 12:07 AM
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BEIRUT: Walid Sadek had been thinking about his latest exhibition for close to six months. He had been working on the web of ideas that would support it for more than seven years. In the end, he had only 20 hours to install the show, in a space that was effectively a construction site on the...
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Don’t call it a comeback
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November 24, 2012 12:02 AM
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BEIRUT: Now in its fourth year, the Beirut Art Center’s annual exhibition of emerging artists has come to define itself by what it is not. It is not representative of contemporary art in or from Lebanon. It is not a curated show. It is not responsive to preset ideas and it is not interested in any...
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From hot topicality to historical depth
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November 12, 2012 12:22 AM
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BEIRUT: Last March the Marrakech Biennale held a panel discussion on Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, which had been rumbling through the region for just 14 months. Curator and film programmer Rasha Salti made a point of mentioning that she was under tremendous pressure to produce something...
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A hefty book, a sprawling show
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November 03, 2012 12:04 AM
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BEIRUT: With just over 100 works of art covering just under 100 years of history, the sprawling “Art from Lebanon: Modern and Contemporary Artists, Volume 1, 1880-1975” opened last week at the Beirut Exhibition Center. Awaited for months and heavily attended on the opening night, there...
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