The Beirut Art Center is presenting two exhibitions devoted to documentary and the complex relationship between art and conflict.
For Jananne Al-Ani and Eric Baudelaire, landscape plays an essential role. The Iraqi video artist takes inspiration from her personal experience in the Middle East. She uses the landscape as a tool to reassert her identity. Her series Shadow Sites is also on display in London as part of the exhibition Light from the Middle East. The photographs are an aerial montage evocative of military reconnaissance missions. They reveal a desert that dashes the fantasy of sandy virgin dunes. Here the desert is dotted with buildings from different eras.
In the work of Eric Baudelaire, the landscape is a political representation. He was inspired by Masao Adachi, a Japanese theorist and filmmaker, and an important figure in the fukei-ron movement, which seeks to identify power structures in everyday life. The story is that of May Shigenobu, born in 1973 in Lebanon to a Japanese mother, Fusako, a member of the Red Army, expatriated in 1971 for having supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Fusako Shigenobu was labeled public enemy number one in Japan following the Lod Airport Massacre in Israel.
In 1974, Masao Adachi traveled to Lebanon to make the propaganda documentary, The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War. The tapes were destroyed in a bombing, which marked the beginning of 27 years devoted to militancy without ever returning to Japan or making films. After three years in a Lebanese Prison, he was forcibly repatriated to Japan in 2000. At the end of the same year, Fusako Shigenobu was arrested in Japan, where she had been living under a false name after years of exile. A few months later, her daughter broke her silence.
Baudelaire’s work revisits these intersecting lives, following their physical and psychological steps. The story neither explicit nor explained. The film loses its viewers the way its subjects are lost in their ideals. It aesthetically reproduces this Japanese expedition to the Middle East, at once real and metaphorical, which ends with an inglorious return. This is what precludes any partial judgment of this episode in history. As Pierre Zaoui says in the catalogue: “It liberates us from the nostalgia of the past, and from any hope for a better future.”
Laurence Cornet
Eric Baudelaire – Now here else elsewhere
Jananne Al-Ani – Groundwork
From February 6th to April 6th, 2013
Beirut Art Center
Jisr El Wati – Off Corniche an Nahr. Building 13, Street 97, Zone 66 Adlieh.
Beirut, Lebanon
+961 (0) 1 397 018
From Monday to Saturday 12:00pm – 8:00pm
