Museum Season in Beirut

There are more initiatives in the works beyond 2015. On October 1, the Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in Lebanon (APEAL) announced a design open call for an institution dubbed “Beirut Contemporary,” on a site owned by the Université Saint-Joseph, across from the National Museum of Beirut. The selection committee, dubbed “A Museum in the Making,” is headed by Lord Peter Palumbo, chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, with international curators and architects Hans Ulrich Obrist, Zaha Hadid, and Julia Peyton-Jones joining recognized local figures Rodolphe Khoury, Lamia Joreige and Fares al-Dahdah. Submissions are due January 2016, with the winner to be announced later in the same year. A charity auction organized by Christie’s in March already yielded more than USD 500,000 in proceeds.

A fourth group is looking to launch a private museum. Artistic Cultural Events (ACE), with the backing of the Saradar Group, has an advisory committee including Saleh Barakat (founder of Agial Art Gallery), Catherine David (deputy director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), Sandra Dagher (co-founder and co-director of Beirut Art Center), Jessica Morgan (director of Dia Art Foundation, New York), Christine Tohmé (founding director of Ashkal Alwan) and Lebanese art critic Joseph Tarrab. With a similar timeframe of a 2020–21 opening, ACE is eyeing a 2,000-square-meter space in a commercial-residential development designed by Christian de Portzamparc in the Karantina district, already home to the Beirut Art Center, Homeworks Space and Sfeir-Semler Gallery.

Along with these ambitious development projects—all contingent on relative continued stability—are also new initiatives working closer to existing communities. Tandem Works, founded by sisters Alia and Mayssa Fattouh, has launched the three-part project “Hammoud Badawi,” for which they are working with the Other Dada (tOD) Integrated Architecture Lab, which was commissioned by the Lebanese government to rehabilitate the polluted Beirut River—today, a concrete canal of wastewater—and surrounding areas. Tandem Works, in turn, has commissioned artist Vartan Avakian to create a sound installation on each side of the river, in advance of a pedestrian bridge that is part of the renewal package, in addition to working on a campaign of civic outreach as well as a publication. Avakian is also having his first solo exhibition, “Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust,” featuring crystals made from the Barakat Building (also known as the Yellow House, an infamous sniper post along the Green Line during the Lebanese Civil War) at the newly opened gallery Marfa’, which means “port” in Arabic. The Barakat Building is itself being fixed up as part of the Beit Beirut project, a joint initiative between the Beirut City Government and the City of Paris to create a new cultural center, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

On the academic front, the city’s leading university, the American University of Beirut (AUB), received a cash donation from Lebanese hedge fund tycoon Philippe Jabre, purportedly in excess of USD 3 million, to endow a chair for art history and curating. Jabre is a patron of the Beirut Art Center who had donated the former factory in Karatina that is now Ashkal Alwan’s Homeworks Space. In 2012, AUB presented more than 60 modern Lebanese artworks from the Saleeby collection, including more than 30 by fin-de-siecle realist Khalil Saleeby himself, and opened two new exhibition spaces. More recently, AUB is creating a permanent museum space on its campus that is expected to open by 2020.

Capping off a busy 2015 for the Beirut art scene, in November, Ashkal Alwan held its seventh edition of Homeworks (11/11–24), one of the enduring platforms that first returned post-civil-war Beirut to the international stage in the 2000s.

HG Masters is editor at large at ArtAsiaPacific. 

Back to News

• Lebanon