Under-Writing Beirut-Mathaf

The artist’s sculpture Object of War and image Views of Museum Square were part of her installation Under-Writing Beirut-Mathaf commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. This Provocation is adapted from a text written for that installation.

— Ed.

When excavating specific instances or locations, whether from the past, present, or projected future, intertemporal continuities and ruptures surface via what persists, what has vanished, and the promise of knowing and imagining inherent in both.

Mathaf, the Arabic word for museum, is also the name of a historically significant area that is home to the National Museum of Beirut. It is also the neighborhood where I live. As if presciently, given the fate of the museum during the wars, the collection was particularly renowned for its anthropoid sarcophagi and extensive funerary material. In 1975, the museum found itself on the “Green Line” that divided East and West Beirut. The Mathaf-Barbir crossing became known as one of the rare passageways where people could traverse from one side of the city to the other during times of truce. Because of its strategic location along the front, the crossing and its surroundings became the site of rampant killings and kidnappings as well as skirmishes between militias and various nations’ armies struggling for its control.

Figure 1.

Views of Museum Square, Lamia Joreige, 2013. Pinhole camera print, from the installation Under-Writing Beirut-Mathaf. (© Lamia Joreige/Sharjah Art Foundation)

The museum itself witnessed its share of shelling, sniper fire, and defacement, and was used as fighters’ barracks and bunkers. Despite the protective measures taken, some objects from the collection were looted or severely damaged. Others simply disappeared. Initially, emergency makeshift measures such as laying sandbags were taken, with more permanent measures adopted in instances of relative calm as the war intensified. The museum’s conservator and his team led the efforts. Wooden boxes were constructed around the museum’s large sculptures, stelae, and sarcophagi, and concrete was poured over them. Horizontal mosaics were made to disappear: covered in plastic bags and coated with cement. Smaller objects from the museum’s display cases were hurriedly returned to the storage areas, which were then walled up and made undetectable.

Once a site meant to represent national unity, the museum and its area became a symbol of the country’s division and the backdrop for sectarian violence. Today, although many of the tensions and issues that led to the Lebanese wars persist, unresolved and unchanged, the landscape of the country, and particularly of Beirut, has been radically altered. Following the city’s large-scale reconstruction, what remains for us to consider or appropriate from the era of the wars, and how should it be handled? Even now as it resembles its pre-war form, the museum continues to be haunted by lingering traces, tormented by the layers of death it carries within its folds, by ghosts who must be summoned and remains that must be exhumed.

Figure 2.

Good Shepherd mosaic, the National Museum of Beirut. (© Lamia Joreige)

Figure 3.

Good Shepherd mosaic, the National Museum of Beirut. (© Lamia Joreige)

It seems impossible to find out which objects from the museum’s collection went missing during the wars. For various reasons — political and nonpolitical, rational and irrational, and mainly practical — it has proven impossible for me to access the museum’s post-war inventory, storage, archive of documents and photographs, and library publications, including the museum’s bulletin.

Among the thousands of pieces from the collection in storage, the only object that was made accessible to me was the Good Shepherd mosaic, possibly because it was going to be displayed to the public in the following year. This mosaic could not be protected during the wars and remains impossible to fully restore because of its vertical positioning. The mosaic bears a hole, believed to have been made strategically by a sniper. The hole provided the sniper with a line of sight onto the Mathaf-Barbir crossing and immediate surroundings. Object...