Marwan Rechmaoui always finds the stuff his works are made of in the city: concrete, cement, wire, wood and ceramics and again and again aluminum and metal, of which in the Sfeir-Semler gallery after the explosion in the port of Beirut last year August a whole lot was lying around.

The shock wave had torn the plaster of paris partition into pieces, bent their metal supports and swept away the aluminum frames of the shattered windows.

Like half the city, the gallery was in ruins.

And Marwan Rechmaoui began to sound out the chaos.

He sorted the metal and aluminum parts according to their size, stacked the irreversibly deformed pieces in a pile that was almost as tall as a man, and circled the material for a few months.

Lena Bopp

Editor in the features section.

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    After that - which is remarkably fast for Rechmaoui, who often worked on his works for years - he had gotten so used to the sight of them that he left the aluminum struts dirty, as on the day it happened but brought them into order that takes away the horror. Now they are in the first show that Andrée Sfeir-Semler is showing in her gallery after the explosion. The title “But the trees kept voting for the ax” is a nice metaphor for the undeniable fact that at least some of the many crises Lebanon is currently going through are homemade. Corruption and negligence also contributed to the explosion. The aluminum struts, which now hang closely next to each other like dull windows on the wall and turn as mobiles in the wind, are a reminder of this catastrophe.

    Suitcase-sized cuboids of the same shape are cleverly arranged, which Rechmaoui had using a machine to press together from the completely bent metal remnants of the gallery. Like people on the run, they traverse the room, move towards the mural “Beirut by the Sea” and continue their journey undeterred on the other side of the wall. Arriving and setting out, immigration and emigration - the references to the present of Beirut, which is being shaken so violently these days that more people than ever seek their salvation abroad, are as varied as those to its history, through which emigration and waves of immigration alike.

    Even now one does not want to sing the swan song, because even if the poverty and hunger of many Lebanese, who suffer from the enormous decline of the local currency, have changed the city in a short time, it is not certain how the decline will continue.

    It is true that many artists are looking to leave the country.

    And there are opportunities.

    For example, the French embassy has just launched a program of residencies for a hundred artists.

    It is doubtful whether Beirut as a creative center, because it is comparatively free, would be so easy to replace.

    Rebuilt

    Andrée Sfeir-Semler, whose gallery has been setting the bar high for contemporary, political art in the city for more than ten years, has in any case rebuilt its branch next to Hamburg and not relocated it to Dubai, from the one here and there in recent weeks I read that it offered Lebanese artists a new home. "In Beirut there is old and new, crooked and crooked, there are things here that you can rub yourself into from morning to night," she says. Marwan Rechmaoui also waves it aside: “You won't find a challenge in Dubai. Anyone who wants to make money can go there. But if you want ideas, don't. "

    You can't imagine Marwan Rechmaoui anywhere else than in Beirut, because for decades his work has revolved around the city in which he was born in 1964. Like other artists of his generation, such as Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari and Rabih Mroué, he is strongly influenced by the post-war period, by the reconstruction in the nineties, which in Beirut paradoxically went hand in hand with the destruction of the old center, whose old souk was largely demolished and through a classy but deserted shopping district was replaced. Rechmaoui always approaches the city very specifically. Not just in the choice of its material. His way of working is also down-to-earth in the sense that he has walked, photographed and mapped all of the districts, with the many religious,seeks to grasp social and cultural fault lines as well as the genealogical, geographical and historical layers. From the resulting complexity, and therein lies his art, he distills works that are often minimalist, but have that broken complexity that defines Beirut.

    This is particularly evident in his “Pillars”, which can be seen most recently in Amsterdam and Sharjah and now for the first time in Beirut. Originally he only wanted to make a handful of them, but now there are more than forty. The roughly two-meter-high, angular pillars made of cement, into which Rechmaoui has worked all kinds of bycatch from bast stools to television sets and ceramic tiles, while leaving openings and lines of sight here and there, are like houses in a city whose stories they are tell: about Syrian construction workers who live on the construction sites they work on; of nature reclaiming abandoned houses; of open staircases, where the neighbors meet in summer because the wind blows through them so beautifully.

    The Beirut audience, to whom these pillars should appear familiar, especially in their disability, will discover far more quotes and references in them: including those that point beyond the city into a region whose basic pillars have been shaking so violently in recent years are. (Prices from $ 15,000 to $ 300,000. Through August.)