AGENDALEBANON
ART
‘Gathered Beyond the Impasse:the Inaugural Show’Art Factum, Rehban Street,KarantinaUntil Jan. 1301-443-263This newly opened gallery dis-plays many contemporary art-works by local and internation-al artists such as Lebanon’sTanya Traboulsi and Japan’sGo Segawa.
‘A Gush of Water Cleared theLand’The Running Horse Gallery,near Sleep Comfort Depot,MedawarUntil Jan. 2401-562-778This collective show featuresworks by Lebanon’s Tala Agh-bashian, Karen Kalou and Lau-ra Pharaon and America’s JuanFontanive, all dealing with thetheme of water.
‘Red, Yellow, Blue’Horse Shoe Building, aboveCosta Café, Hamra Street,HamraUntil Jan. 1403-027-776This group show is comprisedof paintings, drawings, prints,books and accessories byLebanese artists.
‘100 Petits Formats pourGrands Collectionneurs’Alice Mogabgab Gallery,Karam Building, AshrafiehStreet, SassineUntil Dec. 2403-210-424As promised, this exhibitionfeatures diminutive artworks bylocal and international artists –such as France’s Charles Belle,Lebanon’s Fadia Haddad andChile’s Andrea Carreno.
’Palettes Libanaises VI’Zamaan Art Gallery, SadatStreet, HamraUntil Dec. 3101-745-571The sixth edition of this collec-tive exhibition features worksby Lebanese artists such asCharles Khoury and Choucral-lah Fattouh.
‘Art in Iraq Today’Beirut Exhibition Center,Beirut waterfrontUntil Dec. 1809-806-650Works by artists from the Iraqidiaspora.
THEATER
‘Who Killed Marilyn?’Monnot Theater, USJ Street,MonnotUntil Dec. 18, 8:30 p.m.01-421-875Set partially in Lebanon, thisplay takes inspiration fromrumors that Marilyn Monroedid not die of natural causes.
FILM
’Beirut InternationalDocumentary Festival’Madina Theater, Hamra Street,HamraUntil Dec. 2003-196-175Now in its 10th year, this festi-val includes 43 documentariesfrom all over the world as wellas activities related to mediaand filmmaking.
MUSIC
Quatuor ModiglianiAbou Khater Auditorium, USJ,AshrafiehDec. 18, call for time and reser-vations01-999-666This ensemble is composed ofviolinists Philippe Bernhard,Laurent Marfaing and Loic Rioand cellist Francois Kieffer.
Poetry heals the wounds inflictedby reason.
Novalis(1772-1801)
German author and philosopher
JJuusstt aa tthhoouugghhtt
16 ARTS & CULTUREfriday, december 16, 2011
A poetic response to the authoritarianREVIEW
By Jim QuiltyThe Daily Star
DUBAI: Art and politics, as oneadage would have it, don’tmix. Politics are for pam-phlets, not poetry. Anyway,
it’s rare to find a work of art that express-es political sentiment and strong aes-thetics at once.Many of the feature-length fictions
competing at this year’s Dubai Inter-national Film Festival have an air ofpolitics about them, often placing indi-viduals (and therefore relationships) inthe context of repressive political,social and economic realities.“Habibi Rasak Kharban,” (My Dear
there is Something Wrong with yourHead), the 2011 feature film debut ofPalestinian-American writer-directorSusan Youssef is a particularly coura-geous effort to render a love storywithin a complex web of authoritari-anism, and do so poetically.The film, which had its world pre-
miere at Venice in September, is a con-temporary update of “Layla and Maj-nun,” a pre-Islamic Arab folktale ofunrequited love. Youssef chose to sether story in Gaza; she shot a small partof it there as well, making “Habibi” thefirst film to be shot in Gaza in over 15years. Other scenes were shot in theWest Bank.Qays and Layla (Kais Nashif and
Maisa Abd al-Hadi) are students fromBirzeit University who are forced toreturn home to Khan Younes when theIsraeli military revokes the visas of allstudents from Gaza.The opening sequence finds the
couple sitting in the backseat of a taxipulling into their village. Flies buzzaround the inside of the car and landon their hands, which, while nearlytouching, are placed back to back, as ifto underline that all public expressionsof intimacy are banned in this place.They climb out of the taxi without
saying goodbye and are greeted bytheir respective families.The couple’s backstory is played out
in flashback. Layla is of an activist bent(she supports the Popular Front for theLiberation of Palestine) while Qays isa poet. They meet while exploring thework of the 12th-century poet Ibn al-Arabi and this makes the two fall inlove. Isolated, and liberated from theconservative mores of Gaza, they forman intimate sexual relationship.These West Bank episodes are the
most sensual in the film, alluding to thecouple’s physical relationship and the
preliminary intellectual tussle betweenher activism and his aestheticism. When he pouts that his own poetry
will never matter to her – because shefeels the political struggle againstoccupation is more important thanpoetry – she modifies her position.Palestinians must be able to write lovepoetry, she acknowledges, occupationor not, because as soon as they give upon poetry, the occupation has won.Upon returning home, Layla is
immediately informed that, since it’sunknown whether the Israelis will everlift the ban on student visas from Gaza,she had better start thinking about set-
tling down and getting married.There’s already a suitor in the wings.
Ward (Yosef Abu Wardeh) is a social-ly conservative Hamas supporter froma relatively well-off Khan Younes fam-ily who’s just come back from com-pleting a business degree in the U.S. Layla’s unimpressed, especially
when he ignores her warning aboutgoing for a late night drive, just so hecan impress her brother Walid (Jihadal-Khattib) and his pal Rabih. This lit-tle excursion gets Rabih killed by asniper at the local Israeli settlement,which in turn compels Walid towardthe mosque, and into the arms of a
local Islamist party.Qays, meanwhile, has taken a job at
a gravel pit where he’s trying toscrounge together enough money toask Layla’s father if he can marry her.In the meantime, he grows so frustrat-ed with not being able to communicatewith Layla that he buys a tin of redspray paint and begins to adorn thegrey walls of Khan Younes with lovepoems, all dedicated to Layla.No doubt there is more than one
“Layla” in Khan Younes, but the menfolk in her family grow restless with allthis passionate attention. When Laylainforms Qays that her family intends tomarry her off to Ward, he decides toapproach her father directly, withoutcalling upon his own father to act as ago-between, and declare he’s the anony-mous graffiti poet of Khan Younes. Thisdoesn’t impress Layla’s father.Qays’ impetuous behavior causes
him some trouble with Layla’s brotherand his pals from the mosque, forcinghis father, a mild mannered fellow whoradiates “frustrated intellectual,” to sendhim to Gaza City for his own safety. When Layla, who is also desperate-
ly lonely for her lover, tells her dad thatshe wants to go to Gaza City to applyfor a new student visa, the old gentle-man (who would like nothing betterthan his daughter to be educated andfree of Khan Younes) agrees and thestory begins to accelerate toward crisis.“Habibi” emerged the big victor in
DIFF’s Arab film completions, walk-ing away with the FIPRESCI (Interna-tional Federation of Film Critics) prizefor Arab features, the awards for besteditor (which Youssef shared with herproducer, and husband, Man Kit Lam),best actress (Maisa Abd al-Hadi) andbest film.In aesthetic terms, Youssef’s is a
courageous film not because she triedto film in Gaza (she says she managedfive days there before having to retire)but because she has attempted thatmost difficult of feats – combiningwritten and spoken poetry with poeticcinematography. It’s fiendishly diffi-cult to accomplish this feat and at sometimes she succeeds more than others.The use of spray paint in applying
Qays’ poetry to the public spaces ofKhan Younes successfully gives thepoetry a visual temporality that it oth-erwise would lack, as does Youssef’sdecision to have many of Nashif’s poet-ic musings done in voiceover while shestomps through ruined architecture.This strong vote of confidence from
DIFF’s jury says a great deal about theutility of small productions – the film-makers say they shot the film in less than20 days and edited it on a Macintoshcomputer. It also speaks to the quality ofthe competition. As Syrian auteurMohammad Malas, jury president ofDIFF’s Muhr Emirati competition, con-fided, the Arab world nowadays has alot more politics than it does cinema.
Susan Youssef’s debutfeature travels to Gazato chart a Palestinianlove story
REVIEW
Qays (Nashif) and Layla (Abd al-Hadi) are the separated lovers at the core of Youssef’s political love story.
FIAC exhibition uses art to open public discourse in AlgiersBy Kaelen Wilson-GoldieSpecial to The Daily Star
ALGIERS: Two video moni-tors hang side by side on thewall of a museum. Eachscreen is looping through 52
minutes of interview footage. The samesix subjects are speaking, but there is agap of eight years between the video onthe left and the video on the right. To create the installation “Khiam
2000-2007,” the Lebanese artistsJoana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreigereturned twice to a subject that couldnot be filmed. In 1999, they met six people who
had been imprisoned in Khiam, thenotorious detention center run byIsrael’s proxy militia, the SouthLebanon Army. At the time, Israel wasstill occupying a band of villages onthe border, so Hadjithomas and Jor-eige were unable to access the site. Among ordinary people – neither
medics nor military nor diplomaticstaff – Khiam in the 1990s existed onlyin anecdotes, never in images. The sixprisoners – including Soha Bechara,who had been jailed for trying to assas-sinate the SLA boss Antoine Lahd –describe their daily lives in detention,filling the void of visual informationwith a vivid mental map of isolationand deprivation. The emphasis of the first film,
which was completed in 2000, just asthe Israelis withdrew and the detentioncenter was dismantled, rests on theincredible perseverance and ingenuityof the inmates, who found the will to
live in the production and trade of tiny,artisanal objects – artworks of a kindin a radically circumscribed world. After the Israelis left, Hezbollah
turned Khiam into a museum. During the 2006 war, the Israeli Air
Force bombed it to smithereens. A yearlater, Hadjithomas and Joreige inter-viewed the same six people again – inthe second film, they are sadder, lessheroic – and again, Khiam did not assuch exist. The return to this twice-made ruin
is one of the most explicit articulationsof a theme explored in an exhibitionthat opened last week in Algiers,where “Khiam 2000-2007” is installedalongside a dramatic series of photo-graphs, titled “War Trophies,” show-ing Khiam reduced to rubble.“Le Retour (The Return)” is wide-
ranging display of works by 26 artistsfrom almost as many countries. Thereis a towering stack of metal pots by Pas-cale Marthine Tayou, from Cameroon;one of Mona Hatoum’s rug maps;delightful wall drawings by the Roman-ian artist Dan Perjovschi; and an ele-gant installation of prints and videos bythe Moroccan artist Bouchra Khalili. Organized by the curator and critic
Nadira Laggoune, the exhibition consti-tutes the third edition of FIAC, the Fes-tival International d’Art Contemporain.FIAC is the biennial of Algiers in all
but name, despite the fact that it hasbeen staged every year since 2009. “LeRetour” fills three floors in the Muséed’Art Moderne et Contemporain d’Al-ger, a 4-year-old institution knownaffectionately as MAMA. It isn’t Lag-goune’s first exhibition there, but it
might be the most promising, for themuseum and the city’s art scene atlarge, which is opening up after a longspell of isolation. Algeria occupies a special place in
the history of contemporary art outsideof Europe and United States, which isarguably rooted in experimental filmmore so than fine art.After winning a brutal war for inde-
pendence from France in 1962, Alge-ria became a hotbed of politicallyengaged cinema. The winning party,the Front de Libération Nationale,invested heavily in film as a means ofcarrying the revolution forward. Overtime, however, that strategy hardenedinto party orthodoxy as the FLN – aliberation movement aligned with thelikes of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevaraand the Black Panthers – turnedrepressive and authoritarian. By the time Algeria’s horrific civil
war began in the 1990s – after the gov-ernment loosened up, lost an election bya landslide and abruptly clamped downagain – cinema had stagnated. Artistswere among the scores of intellectualstargeted for gruesome assassinations bythe splintering factions of an increas-ingly violent Islamist opposition.In 1994, Ahmad Asselah, the direc-
tor of Algiers’ prestigious EcoleSupérieure des Beaux Arts, was shotand killed on campus, alongside hisson. Many Algerian artists who arenow internationally prominent,including Adel Abdessemed, were stu-dents then, and took this as their cue toleave the country. The civil war is never locally
acknowledged as such – only as “the
invisible war,” “terrorism” or “theblack decade” – but Oussama Tabti, a23-year-year graduate of ESBA, delin-eates the era with haunting simplicityin his installation for FIAC, titled“Stand By.”The piece consists of 21 scans of the
back inside covers of library books.The checkout pockets are stampedwith due dates: 1992, 1993, 1994, thena tortured pause until the dates resumein 2001. Tabti’s work is one of several on
view at MAMA to use the notion of“the return” as an occasion to revisitvexed histories, which might other-wise be taboo or, in the case of AmalBen Attia’s video “Couvre Feu (Cur-few),” shot on a mobile phone in themidst of Tunisia’s uprising last winter,too fresh to fully process. As such theexhibition is a terrific example ofpolitically sensitive material beingsmuggled into public discourse underthe guise of contemporary art. What makes “Le Retour” better than
polemics or a palliative exercise ingroup-grief, however, is that ultimate-ly Laggoune’s choices are concernedwith a return to the imagination, to the
life of the mind and to oneself. Neïl Beloufa’s mesmerizing video
“Untitled” may have been inspired bya story the artist once heard about agroup of terrorists who occupied anexposed glass villa during the blackdecade in Algiers, but the work itselfpushes far beyond the return of therepressed. Formally brilliant, with anelaborate set made of just cardboardand paper, “Untitled” is a rhythmic,stylized rumination on the relationshipbetween fear and fantasy. A subtle undercurrent of psycho-
logically probing works on femininity– in Alice Anderson’s evocative video“Prompt Book” and Claudia Casari-no’s installation of diaphanous night-gowns – gives “Le Retour” anotheredge. The exhibition also shows greatpotential for creating a kind of call andresponse between Algiers and Beiruton artworks dealing with civil wars. As such, this edition of FIAC not
only returns Algiers to cultural promi-nence, it also signals a reactivation ofcreativity and critical thought.“Le Retour” runs through Feb. 3 atMAMA, 25 Larbi Ben M’hidi Street, Algiers.
Abd al-Hadi won best actress for her performance as Layla.
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Hadjithomas and Joreige, from the series “War Trophies,” color photographs on aluminum, 2006-2007. A detail from Tabti’s installation “Stand By,” 21 works on paper, 2011.
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