When she visited a portrait exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1970, Simone Fattal was astonished: Only painted pictures were there, but no new media, not a single video.
The Beirut artist, who is also a painter, then had herself filmed for seven hours, chatting about her childhood, her family, and her work in the studio, underscoring her story with hits from her homeland, Lebanon, and interspersed it with snippets of private life, at home at the coffee table, parties with girlfriends.
Not only the anecdotes, but also the gestures of the young woman with her casual self-confidence contour the portrait.
One would call this portrait time-based today; in the Berlin exhibition on art from Beirut in the “Golden Sixties” it immediately catches the eye because, about halfway there, it also announces the arrival of the art of that time in the present in the media.
However, the artist did not finalize her “Autoportrait” until much later, in 2012.
Ruinous street scenes
Contemporary art, the way it analyzes the crises, conflicts and imponderables of the present in images and concepts, is now largely fueled by Lebanese artists in the relevant large-scale exhibitions.
So it makes sense to take a look at their history.
Throughout the exhibition in the Gropiusbau, the desire of the most diverse artists to capture the tensions of the time can be felt.
These are plentiful (and still topical today), such as the experiences of flight, camp, exile, impoverishment, which, for example, Rafic Charaf, a dystopian spirit, reflects in gloomy, ruinous street scenes - only to then, in turn, stylistically completely surprisingly, transform themselves into folkloric traditions .
Invaders like tin soldiers
In the show, with its two hundred paintings, sculptures, graphics and numerous archival items, one feels from the first work on the social and political pulse of the Arab metropolis, even with a naive painting such as a harbor scene by the self-taught artist Khalil Zgaib from 1958. The The trained hairdresser describes the invasion of the American marines on the southern coast of Khaldeh and thus a dramatic chapter in contemporary history, when the United States under President Eisenhower promoted a Lebanese change of government.
The invaders line up on submarines and warships like tin soldiers, the beach, sea and sky are neatly stacked as backgrounds.
Zgaib would later perish in the Lebanese civil war in 1975.
Jamil Molaeb documents its terror in an extensive war diary of black and white drawings: corpses hang from barbed wire, are brutally dragged through the street or pile up in front of a bus, as happened in Ain el Remmaneh, where the massacre of Palestinian passengers in 1975 left the last spark for the outbreak of the eternal civil war.
Prosperous city on the move
Between these events, over a period of almost two decades, the exhibition unfolds the image of a prosperous yet fragile city on the move.
The curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, new directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof, direct their attention to the "Port de Beyrouth" as the cosmopolitan center of that brief heyday, to the complicated political, ideological, religious mixtures, but also to the social and sexual upheavals in the sixties, as brought to the screen by Hugette Caland, Cici Sursock, Helen El Khal and Juliana Seraphim, ranging from classical nude to anatomical detail.
Here, by the way, the injured, mutilated body is mixed in with the motifs.
With a few exceptions, such as the painter Etel Adnan, the artists are less well known in this country.
If you don't pay close attention to the name tags during the tour, you could quickly miss how flexible and unorthodox many of them exploit a disparate repertoire in style and subject, such as the surrealist Aref El Rayess or the painter Paul Guiragossian, son of Armenian parents who committed the genocide had survived.
Guiragossian stages “Silence” in strips of color, paints refugee camps in an abstract manner and then paints the “Funeral of Abdel Nasser” (1970) in elegiac brushstrokes.
Shafic Abboud charges his gestural abstraction with historical significance by writing the date of June 5th in 1967 as a code for the Six-Day War using a stencil.
Breaking the usual "metanarratives of western modernity" with new perspectives is undoubtedly a worthwhile and contemporary suggestion, but unfortunately the two curators stage their panorama as an "immersive environment" that is probably unavoidable today - with huge, feel-good photos of beach life and dolce vita , instead of relying on the effect of the images, which also don't bother with clichés.
A serious presentation would be more appropriate, especially since an artist like Akram Zaatari would certainly have current Lebanese skills at his disposal who could have arranged a well-founded photo parcours.
Sometimes the works are even hung directly on the photos, which brings them into unnecessary competition.
The closing point of the show also fades away in a video installation by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: the images from the surveillance cameras in the Sursock Museum can be seen in those seconds on August 4, 2020, when the historic explosion occurred in the port of Beirut.
There is no added value for remembering the accident.
Time and time again, the exhibition falls into the self-imposed immersion trap.
Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility. In the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; until June 12th. No catalogue.