8 April, 2021 to 29 May, 2021
Tabbal Building, Sursock Street, Beirut.
AD Leb’s first pop-up exhibition brings together both newly commissioned and existing works by local artists and designers, who were asked to create and produce works as a response to themes invoked by the exhibition title. Their responses to the title are expressed through a range of mediums including illustration, photography, neon artwork and furniture. The exhibition questions what it means to produce and exhibit art amid the daily precariousness we face in Lebanon.
How can art and design shape our experience of the present moment? What role do they play in the increasingly virtual and crisis-prone world we live in today? To what extent is artistic creation an act of faith?
The exhibition asks us to reflect on these questions, creating a dialogue between the works on display and their responses to these themes. The exhibition title is a reference to the caption Gaïa Fodoulian used in her last Facebook post: a photo of her published on 4 August 2020 – a date that is now seared into our memories – running towards the camera, a mountain of green behind her. The picture was originally taken at the Dambulla Cave Temple, Sri Lanka, in February 2020. It is impossible to tell what Fodoulian had in mind when she created this post as she was killed just a few hours after. But the question of faith – what it means to have it, and more importantly, how difficult it is to live without it – is relevant today more than ever.
Participating artists include Samer Bou Rjeily, Sirine Fattouh, Gaïa Fodoulian, Hatem Imam, Paul Kaloustian, Karen Chekerdjian, Nathalie Khayat, Hussein Nassereddine, and Caroline Tabet.