Chad Elias’ Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-War Lebanon
Book review for Third Text online, May 2019
Excerpt
If post-civil war Lebanese art didn’t exist, it would be necessary for art historians to invent it. In form, method and content, the conceptually savvy art produced in Lebanon during the 1990s and 2000s embodied the critical preoccupations of global contemporary art around the turn of the millennium. Here were parafictional archives insinuating suppressed histories through fabulated personae and events; multimedia installations resuscitating traces of revolutionary hope lost to an imperial proxy war and neoliberal state policy; essay-films that trouble representation, testifying to the opacities engendered by trauma as they challenged documentary’s modus operandi of providing visual evidence; appropriated images turned haunted icons, mnemonic symbols of intergenerational witnessing for those marked by the condition of post-memory.
On the heels of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990), a coterie of Beirut artists –who, born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, grew up amid car bombs, snipers, sieges and foreign occupations – produced highly theoretical and yet poignant projects, largely in lens-based media, that circulated at a serendipitous moment marked by both the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary art and the vogue for all things Arab that followed the 11 September 2001 attacks. ‘By 2003, one could speak of an inflation of contemporary Lebanese art’, the Beirut-based artist Walid Sadek has written, noting how local and global conditions permitted his colleagues to ‘graduate from the tenuous position of a survivor to the privileged position of a vetted onlooker who stands astride the wreckage and addresses the world’. With new art institutions in Beirut welcoming international critics, curators and collectors, shows by Lebanese artists took off around the world. Exhibitions such as the Beirut-focused ‘Contemporary Arab Representations’ (curated by Catherine David for Witte de With in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in 2002) and ‘Out of Beirut’ (curated by Suzanne Cotter for Modern Art Oxford in the UK in 2006) assembled key post-war Lebanese artists and stimulated widespread critical interest in the scene.
Now, the art historian Chad Elias has written the first book-length study of Lebanese contemporary art, developed from his doctoral dissertation. Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon focuses on several of the more internationally renowned artists of Lebanon’s ‘war generation’, including Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Rabih Mroué, Lamia Joreige, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. His analysis centres on these artists’ critical efforts to retrieve local histories and wartime memories suppressed by ‘state-sanctioned amnesia’ – a project they undertake even as they question dominant methods of commemorating a disquieting past. For Elias, these artistic practices critique both the forgetting imposed by the state as well as conventions of documentary practice and memorialisation that fail to attend to the social contexts that make acts of witnessing and remembering meaningful. Moreover, he emphasises the significant effects of evolving media technologies in reproducing and transmitting political imagery that circulates partial histories of the war and its afterlives, in the absence of definitive narratives.