Working the home

During Israel's invasion of the West Bank "A Forum on Cultural Practices in the Region" proceeded unhindered in Beirut. Palestinian participant Randa Shaath noted the ironies of such an unfortunately timed cultural triumph
Supported by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture's Arab Cultural Season, "A Forum on Cultural Practices in the Region" (2-7 April) found an ideal setting in Beirut -- a centre of Arab cosmopolitanism, in the wake of the liberation of the south, if ever one existed.
Organised by the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan (Shapes Colours), headed by Christine Tohme, and funded collaboratively by a number of grants -- from the Iranian Institute for the Promotion of Visual Arts, Prince Klaus and the Ford Foundations -- the forum brought together participants from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria. Artists, curators, writers, academics, filmmakers and theatre people presented and discussed their work with an interested and informed audience, many of whose members could not attend as frequently as they would have liked to. They were busy with demonstrations, protests, strikes and other acts of solidarity.
The main venue of the forum, Madina Theatre, used on 8 April as the setting for a large-scale solidarity event that many participants and audience members attended, throbbed with multi-media activity and debate throughout the duration of the event.
In the open, culturally varied and thus politically charged atmosphere of the Lebanese capital, Tohme's overriding objective -- "to initiate a dialogue among people in the region who have common political and social concerns, but who continue to know little about one another" -- nonetheless found energetic and wide-ranging expression.
One such common concern, which initially undermined the project, was the ongoing Palestinian plight. Participants and invitees from Western Europe posed the question of whether, in the light of Israel's invasion of the West Bank, Ashkal Alwan would choose to cancel the project altogether, perhaps postponing it to a later date. Tohme insisted that, rather than being an unnecessary and ill-timed distraction, the forum was in fact relevant to the Arab-Israeli conflict: by engaging with each other's cultural practices Arabs would be participating in, rather than obstructing, the struggle. The forum, after all, witnessed the participation of Palestinians arriving straight from Ramallah and Jerusalem. In fact the Ramallah participant, academic Issam Nassar, went through an elaborate process of dodging Israeli authorities: arriving at the early stages of reoccupation he narrowly escaped the fate awaiting the vast majority of Palestinian men: murder, detention or at best house arrest.
Entitled "Home Works," the forum was unusual in that it incorporated a wide range of artistic endeavours, discussing both theory and practice in a thorough and accessible way -- an accomplishment that has been very rarely, if ever, equalled in the Arab World. My own photo exhibit, depicting daily life in Egypt and Palestine, was complemented by Nassar's lecture on the history of photography in Palestine. Distinguishing between early European photographers' images of Palestine, which concentrated on landscape and biblical imagery, and later local photographer's images, which paid more attention to the day-to-day dynamics of the visual, Nassar's lecture -- not directly related -- helped to historically and socially contextualise the work of a present-day photojournalist who spent most of her life in Egypt. Having attended Nassar's slide show, I was sure the viewer would be more aware of the implications surrounding my pictures.
The word "home" in the title, Tohme explained, implies the Arab region. Her project, as columnist Pierre Abi-Saab elucidated in Al-Hayat, is to expose the inner dynamics of contemporary Arab creativity -- which hold so many keys to the social and political psyche -- and thereby present the moment of its conception, its happening, in an immediate way: an aim that was realised to an impressive degree. "Works" in turn encompasses both end product and creative process -- in the plural. "Proceeding from a basic mission in every photograph as an invitation to looking," Lebanese filmmaker, video artist and researcher Akram Zaatari wrote, introducing his lecture, "and far from discussing it as evidence, this presentation seeks a certain document value in images produced by contemporary artists in Lebanon [aiming] to define a timeless actuality in any archive." The next day, the video Baalbeck, to which Zaatari contributed, exemplified the process whereby images come to act as ways of seeing, even interpreting reality.
The talk by Egyptian academic Samia Mehrez, entitled "Image in Crisis" and taking place directly before Zaatari's lecture, expanded this idea further by commenting on the Egyptian prime-time television series Hagg Metwalli's Family, shown on many local and satellite Arab channels. In this "positive representation of a Muslim, self-made man who marries five women," which gave rise to wide-ranging debate throughout the Arab World and beyond, the metaphor of the image -- a way of seeing, the concept of a life -- was used as the basis of arguments about "the relationship between society and art, authority and creativity... truth and representation."
Against the backdrop of ongoing protests and strikes -- people camping outdoors in Sahat Al- Shuhada -- the forum featured a wide variety of performances, exhibits and lectures besides. The Egyptian contribution included Hassan Khan (an audiovisual performance) and a screening of Shadi Abdel- Salam's The Day of Counting the Years, while Lebanon provided the opening lecture, by poet Abbas Baydoun, a lecture and film by Jalal Toufic, a joint lecture by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, a remarkable theatrical performance by Lina Saneh and Rabih Mroueh and a street performance by Nadine Touma. Iranian artist Bita Fayyazzi showed an installation, The Crows, while Iraqi artist Jananne Al-Ani gave a lecture on "scenes and types" and Syrian journalist Mohamad Al-Atassi discussed the functioning of the Arab press. These and other participants demonstrated that, even as the conflict rages in Palestine, inter-regional understanding is possible.
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