During the war I was heavily influenced by the pop culture infused 80’s and spent my childhood, watching television zapping between “Dabkeh” (the national Lebanese folklore dance) and tango competitions, also, listening to radio and switching back and forth between Arabic songs and 80’s classic hits. The result: a slightly bipolar approach to art making that, along with the rest of the Lebanese population, sits somewhere between two cultures, and switches back and forth through a remote control and a radio knob to pick the one that fits most.
As for my background, it goes without saying that one’s career will always be influenced by one’s social, demographic context and environment. Being Lebanese, I was raised under the influence of Western and Arab cultures. These different cultural conditions create a hybrid ground that is conducive to a critical and self-reflective approach to life, which made me particularly able to adapt to different cultural settings.
1) Sudden severe changes of creative moods, due to a fusion between his culture and westernization. 2) Since one's artwork is mainly intuitive, a person may not know that creatively he is bipolar.
go to peace building project
The fusion of worlds, the overlapping of thoughts and traditions produce a “bipolar approach to art making”
The emblem below illustrates 5 folklore dancers performing the “Dabkeh” (the national Lebanese folklore dance) manipulated by a vintage remote control. The graphical idea of the emblem is to reflect the modern Lebanese visual identity, which I believe, is neither Arabic nor occidental, but a fusion of both. Furthermore, in the 1950’s and 60’s major Local brands started experimenting with designs and new brandings on their products. The result, Arabic designed fonts closed to Latin ones only to reject the idea of arabesque and detach our country from its regional context in the middle-east in terms of visual identity. A process that I believe paved the way for I what I call Lebanese Contemporary Mainstream Art.
Arabic adaptation
Throughout history, Lebanon was invaded and colonized by a zillion of central European, Arab, Eastern European civilizations and lastly American Missionaries in the 1800's, spreading and preaching christianity in major city pockets in the heart of Beirut City. This has definitely added to the identity crisis, no feelings of belonging, all of which made me feel that i live in a place detached in the middle sea with no anchor, floating back and forth between the current of major powers and background influences.
During Abd el Nasser’s rule in Egypt and the rise of pan-Arabism and nationalism that spread across the Middle East which was heavily backed by the soviet union, pan Arab Artists emerged to promote the Arab cause and nationalism. Moreover, the emergence of international Arab artists such as Oum Koulsoun in Egypt who was composing Arabic quarter tones scale musical pieces which were 20 minutes long and lyrics promoting the Arab cause and blood. In addition, Musicologists in Egypt were experimenting with new modern Arabic instruments such as the oriental guitar all of which to reinforce their pan-Arab identity. In contrast, Lebanon was culturally and artistically heading for the opposite direction. Furthermore, Major Lebanese artists such as Fairouz dismissed using quarter notes (Arabic and oriental musical scales) and experimented with new compositions inspired from the west such as Russian folklore, classical music minor scales compositions wrapped with a Beatlelesque pop song structure but sang in Arabic. go to myspace
Lebanon in post world-war II, massive architectural projects were built, all of which were of a concrete, brutal, and very modern typology. For instance, international Brazilian architect Nyemeyer was commissioned to build a one million meter square fair in Tripoli (A city north of Lebanon) that has nothing to do with oriental/Islamic architecture, that rejected the idea of the arch and mosaic, and created a big threat to its existence through its sheer size and monumentality. Go to preview pics
OUR CIVIL WAR WAS A BATTLE OF CULTURE
During the Lebanese civil war, subcultures were constantly emerging, from social realism in art to global mesh arts and western modern art. The performance will visualize the idea that Lebanon’s civil war was unconventional and a fictional one in the sense that the fighting took a different approach, and that artists were fighting each others with musical genres, shooting one another with notes, musical scales, words, performances etc. Like any war in history nobody wins at the end, but in this case in particular, one wins over the other, the winner is neither physically present, nor defined... its the hybrid.
The plot portrays the battle of identities through arts, where light and sound sensors will flicker and twitch acting as instinctive impulses, motor sensors that usually drive humans to act emotionally and instinctively hence committing crimes in civil wars with the excuse that they have done it to defend their existence, belonging and identity. In this performance, typologies of design, architecture, music with one tone/semi tone (western musical scales) versus quarter notes (Arabic musical scale) will battle one other for exiatance and belonging.
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