{"id":9872,"date":"2022-09-05T10:54:42","date_gmt":"2022-09-05T08:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=9872"},"modified":"2022-12-25T11:22:28","modified_gmt":"2022-12-25T09:22:28","slug":"16-formidable-lebanese-photographers-in-an-abbey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/16-formidable-lebanese-photographers-in-an-abbey\/","title":{"rendered":"16 Formidable Lebanese Photographers in an Abbey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nasri Sayegh’s “Stela(s),” case study from “Exquisite Landscapes – Seen Things,” 2020, Inkjet print (photo courtesy Nasri Sayegh).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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100 miles north of Paris in the town of Jumi\u00e8ges, an art gallery is highlighting contemporary Lebanese photography. Titled \u201cAu bord du monde, vivent nos vertiges<\/a>\u201d or \u201cOur Vertigo Resides at the Edge of the World,\u201d the show features the work of 16 artists at the Abbaye de Jumi\u00e8ges, a French heritage site in the heart of the Normandy countryside. Through November 6, 2022.<\/p>\n

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Nada Ghosn<\/h4>\n

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A little more than 100 miles from Paris, in the Seine valley, is an ancient Benedictine abbey. A symbol of Carolingian monarchism and one of the key places of Romanesque art, it was founded in 654 by Saint Philibert, son of a Frankish count of Vasconia, in Jumi\u00e8ges, in a loop of the Seine, thanks to a donation from Clovis II. It is the earliest and the largest of the great Norman abbeys.<\/p>\n

Following its founding, Jumi\u00e8ges quickly became one of the most important literary centers of the region, and then a place of exile for the enemies of the Carolingian dynasty. The Abbey de Jumi\u00e8ges was burned and plundered during the Viking invasions in the ninth century, but the Romanesque choir of the great abbey church would be rebuilt in Gothic style in the 13th<\/sup>. With the Norman takeover of the Church of England, the community experienced a period of dynamism and prosperity. Today, almost half of the 400 manuscripts in the library date from that period. During the Wars of Religion, the Abbey was sacked again and then, with the French Revolution, sold and partly demolished. It was only in the 19th<\/sup> century that this monument was refurbished by the mayor of Jumi\u00e8ges. The Abbey attained newfound fame during the Romantic Movement, thanks to Victor Hugo and the historian Robert de Lasteyrie, who described it as \u201cone of the most admirable ruins in France.\u201d In 1947, the Abbey of Jumi\u00e8ges became the property of France, and then of the Department of Seine-Maritime in 2007.<\/p>\n

To perpetuate the life of this heritage site, where dialectics and foreign languages were once taught, the Department holds an annual cultural program, including exhibitions of photographs, in which the work of masters such as Josef Koudelka and Henri Cartier-Bresson have been featured. The economic and social crisis that Lebanon has been going through, particularly since the explosion of the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, led the Department to designate 2022 as the year of France and Lebanon in Normandy. As part of the festivities, Laure d’Hauteville was brought in to organize an exhibition on contemporary Lebanese photography.<\/p>\n

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A place full of meaning<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Laure d’Hauteville (photo courtesy Ir\u00e8ne de Rosen).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Laure d\u2019Hauteville has been in contact with Lebanon from childhood,\u00a0as her parents and grandparents would host Lebanese visitors at their house in Paris during the civil war (1975-1990). After studying art, she realized her dream and went to work in Lebanon in education in\u00a01991, then became an artistic advisor at a bank and finally a cultural journalist. She launched ARTUEL, the first art fair in the Middle East, in Beirut, in 1998, which ran until 2005. D’Hauteville also began\u00a0bringing Arab artists to France for annual exhibitions. In 2005, following the murder of Rafik Hariri, Lebanon\u2019s former prime minister, she returned to France and studied at the Boule school. She worked for Art Paris and brought it to Abu Dhabi in 2007 and 2008, at the same time as the installation of the Louvre Abu Dhabi project. In 2009, she returned to Lebanon with her husband, Guillaume Tasl\u00e9 d\u2019H\u00e9liand, where in 2010 she founded the Beirut Art Fair, dedicated to Middle Eastern art, which ran until 2019. After that year’s October Revolution, she returned to Paris, and following the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020, she created MENART FAIR in Paris.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the Department of Seine-Maritime called me, I immediately thought of working with a curator in Lebanon, Cl\u00e9mence Cottard Hachem, historian of ancient, modern and contemporary photography. I wanted an exhibition that would be a way to help people understand what the Lebanese in Lebanon are experiencing on a daily basis. It is important that the European public be transported in a dizzying state to comprehend what is going on, and also to see the great quality of the artists,” d’Hauteville said in an interview with The Markaz Review.<\/p>\n

“A visit to the Abbey and Jumi\u00e8ges, with its history and environment,” she continued, “inspired our first artistic selections. In a poetic and political way, in a totally different context, a pristine and historically charged place, \u2018Our Vertigo Resides at the Edge of the World\u2019 found its place.”<\/p>\n

When we enter the abbey, we find ourselves in the penumbra. There begins our initiatory journey, challenged by the photos, the statuettes, the calm of the abbey. “It was necessary to give meaning to the exhibition in relation to the abbot\u2019s residence,\u201d said d\u2019Hauteville. \u201cHow to create a dialogue between the photographs and the Gothic and lapidary statuettes present in the place, to render an almost mysterious side between the place and our selections, as if the one and the other complemented each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Joanna Andraos’ photos and the statues of the abbey house (@Gregory Buchakjian).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The exhibition questions the formats of photography itself in the face of the new visual writing that we are seeing from artists young and old. “It was important to exhibit different generations of photographers, such as Laetitia el Hakim and Tarek Haddad, up to the big stars like Joana Hadjitomas and Khalil Joreige, to show how today, thanks to them, we can talk about photographic practices in Lebanon,\u201d said d\u2019Hauteville.<\/p>\n

The artists question sculptural writing and its staging in space, thus pushing the limits of more classical documentary photography. Some pieces speak of beauty and softness, others of cruelty, chaos, and violence. Throughout the exhibition, the viewer comes face to face with Lebanon\u2019s ambivalent present. The exhibition does not seek to give answers, but to question how creativity and culture can be central to living in a context of collapse, how we represent what happens to the Lebanese, how we tell stories, how we can sublimate what happens into art.<\/p>\n

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Laetitia Hakim & Tarek Haddad, “A Stretch of Water,” 2021 (laser print on jersey cotton, stretched and mounted, 280 x 54.5 cm, (photo Laetitia Hakim & Tarek Haddad).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Water as a starting point<\/strong><\/p>\n

Water is the main focus of the exhibition since the abbey is located in the loops of the Seine. The first part, \u201cLiquid Geographies,<\/em>\u201d deals with this element in relation to the Lebanese landscape. Water as Lebanon\u2019s great wealth serves as a metaphor for a floating territory, which crystallizes and evaporates.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe River\u201d by Lara Tabet (2018), opens the tour, above the tomb of the Enerv\u00e9s de Jumi\u00e8ges<\/em>. According to legend, the two sons of Clovis II were punished by being enervated, i.e., their muscle tendons were burned so that they could not move. The two princes were then placed on a raft without an oar or a rudder, and left to drift, at the mercy of the waves of the Seine, in the icy immensity, where the sky and the water merge, to end up stranded in Jumi\u00e8ges, where a monk from the abbey took them in and cared for them.<\/p>\n

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Lara Tabet and Les \u00e9nerv\u00e9s de Jumi\u00e8ges<\/em>, detail (photo Gregory Buchakjian).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Lara\u2019s work, which analyzes the bacteria in the river of Beirut, made perfect sense… We built all our selections according to the place, which is full of stone sculptures recalling the history of the monastery, such as the head of William the Conqueror or the funeral slab of Agn\u00e8s Sorel, the monks of the abbey carrying the key to paradise, and others bringing a new meaning to the works. The visitor comes out of it shaken, touched, in full vertigo,” said the curator.<\/p>\n

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Between past and present<\/strong><\/p>\n

The second part, \u201cPasserelles temporelles,<\/em>\u201d deals with what has happened in the last 20 years, particularly the troubled relationship between time and memory in Lebanon. \u201cAgenda 1979<\/a>,\u201da video, is particularly moving because of its aesthetics, its disturbing music, the very poetic text of Val\u00e9rie Cachard, with the voice of Gregory Buchakjian in the background, as he reads the contents of a diary dating from 1979 found in the rubble of an abandoned house in Beirut. An instruction manual for the manufacture of mines aimed at destroying a country, it belonged to a former Lebanese militiaman who left for the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the video, Cachard lists the numerous attacks recorded by governments around the world. Even without any mention of August 4, 2020, everything circles back to this crime, and to the carelessness, even the absolute ignorance of the Lebanese state.<\/p>\n

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