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100 days, 100 notes, 100 thoughts
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April 24, 2012 12:18 AM
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BEIRUT: “Because the population is so small, Lebanon actually has the highest density of artists in the whole of DOCUMENTA,” says Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, her chirpy declaration serving to explain why she’s in Beirut some 45 days before the opening of a large-scale exhibition in a small German...
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Collector, recycler, game changer, enigma
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April 07, 2012 12:05 AM
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BEIRUT: Hassan Sharif collects a great many things of seemingly little to no value: newspapers, cardboard boxes, spoons, tools, bits of plumbing, plastic buckets, aluminum trays, cheap sandals, chintzy coffee mugs and nylon rope in a riot of eye-popping colors. “I don’t throw things...
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A cosmopolite returns to Beirut
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March 31, 2012 12:06 AM
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BEIRUT: In 2003, artist Sara Badr took a day trip from Beirut to Jezzine. It wasn’t the closest town to the Israeli border, but Badr felt oppressed by her proximity to such a heavy political fault line. In a moment of exasperation, she titled her camera to the sky and took a photo –...
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Sober Days and Sleepless Nights
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March 21, 2012 12:08 AM
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BEIRUT: Whatever happened to Rafik Majzoub? For more than a decade, starting in the mid 1990s, he was one of Beirut’s most promising and prolific painters. His agitated self-portraits, with their disquieting blend of aggression and delicacy, filled galleries for a steady succession of solo...
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Contemporary art gives new life to a modernist ruin
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March 17, 2012 12:25 AM
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MARRAKECH: In Katia Kameli’s 12-minute video “The Storyteller,” a man with a rumbling voice and a bashed up nose stalks the raw concrete balconies of an unfinished opera house. His movements are timed to the twists and turns of an elaborate story he tells about two young boys who...
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Fevered bodies, purloined letters
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February 25, 2012 12:05 AM
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BEIRUT: Eight years ago, when the Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli was still living in Ramallah and hadn’t yet moved to London, she told the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif that life under occupation, even with an Israeli passport, pushes a writer to retreat into “a kind of autism....
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Thematic exhibitions, revolving doors
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February 07, 2012 12:08 AM
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BEIRUT: It was perhaps inevitable that, after so many uprisings sparked and crackled in the Arab world last year, people would eventually tire of tracking the long, manic, uncertain process of revolution in real time. After the first round – Ben Ali’s abdication, Mubarak’s...
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Another year, another Salon d’Automne gets under way
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February 03, 2012 12:05 AM
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BEIRUT: The Sursock Museum’s 31st annual Salon d’Automne opened a season late last weekend, in the depths of a dank and rain-drenched winter. The appeal of this year’s invitational exhibition lies primarily in its capacious embrace of photography, a medium that jury members have...
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On old stories writ large, and long
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December 29, 2011 12:35 AM
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BEIRUT: A cottage industry in books about the Arab Spring is already well under way, despite the fact that most of the revolutions in the region are still incomplete, compromised, thwarted or stuck. Those responding to the chain of events set off by Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation in...
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A bouquet of new spaces and work
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December 27, 2011 12:03 AM
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BEIRUT: The past 12 months have seen unprecedented growth in the local art scene. By square meters alone, there are now more commercial galleries, non-profit art centers and hybridized contemporary art spaces up and running in Beirut than at any time in the last 10 years. Where once there was only...
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Rockers squeezed from the sponge
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December 21, 2011 12:12 AM
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BEIRUT: Arlette is earthy and a little austere. Raymonde is soft and sleepy. Odile is all rock’n’roll. Constance is curvy. Yves and Yvette are most certainly lovers. Margot? A mother. Amandine? A swinger. Spiridon will make you laugh. Geoffroy will remind you of school. Yvonne simply...
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FIAC exhibition uses art to open public discourse in Algiers
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December 16, 2011 12:34 AM
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ALGIERS: Two video monitors hang side by side on the wall of a museum. Each screen is looping through 52 minutes of interview footage. The same six subjects are speaking, but there is a gap of eight years between the video on the left and the video on the right. To create the installation...
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Contemporary art as country’s intellectual reconstruction
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December 12, 2011 12:28 AM
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BEIRUT: Three young Lebanese entrepreneurs have joined forces to create a new initiative that strays far afield of their usual business plans. Maya Karanouh, Hala Fadel and Tarek Sadi have backgrounds in branding, fund management and venture capitalism, respectively. Their joint project, however,...
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Beirut Art Center’s ‘Exposure’ grows up and gets real
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December 03, 2011 12:12 AM
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BEIRUT: It takes a second or so to realize there is something strange about the gleaming black Mercedes – not least the fact that it is parked at a rakish angle in the middle of the Beirut Art Center’s ground floor exhibition space. The car’s fabled curves are a little rough, the...
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On cluster bombs, camps and class
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December 02, 2011 12:31 AM
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BEIRUT: Marwan Rechmaoui’s first solo exhibition in more than a decade resembles none of the work for which the artist has become known. Since the late 1990s, Rechmaoui, now 47, has produced just four major pieces, all of them imposing, large-scale sculptural works that manipulate a...
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