[-empyre-] Mirene-reponse

[mirene arsanios]

Hello

Thank you Renata and Tim for this invitation, and to all the guests for
contributing to this discussion with such thought-provoking posts.

A brief introduction on me: I have moved to Beirut 3 years ago, where I have
set up with my cousin and partner Marwa Arsanios the artist organization
98weeks research project. Our ambition was to create a discursive platform
addressed to our generation of artists where to discuss specific issues
collectively and through cross-disciplinary approaches.  Our first research
topic was “spatial practices”. 98weeks corresponds to the time dedicated to
each research topic. Our current research theme is “on publications”, a
research on arts and cultural magazines produced in Lebanon and in the Arab
world since the 30s.
Through 98weeks, my interest was to generate knowledge, often an amateur
knowledge produced outside academia (although both Marwa and I teach in
universities) and that creatively seeks to rethink what is considered to be
“lacking” in this context (lack of art schools, of art critics, of money, of
exhibitions, museum etc.). How are these lacks  determined  in relation to
Eurocentric models, and what  could we actually do, produce or think from
here, and not necessarily in relation to “there”?
Our work was always motivated by an -often personal- research interest,
which may or may not respond to the current enthusiasm for Middle Eastern
contemporary art. We are inevitably conditioned and perhaps the product of
such interest, but within these conditions, we try to find guiding
principles that are not determined by such logic.

I would like to contribute to the discussion on the Egyptian revolution by
addressing the question of the artist's role in relation to major historical
and political events through a personal experience.

One striking feature of the Beirut art scene is its ability to exist in
parallel to a corrupt political system, in a country where the threat of a
new war is never very distant. This ability to exist in parallel has both
positive and negative aspects; social classes are deeply segregated, the
rich and the poor live very different lives. However, the fact of having no
common ground, no representative public sphere, also facilitates the
creation of parallel organizations, which substitute for the workings of the
state (I think that there are about 8000 NGOs registered in Lebanon).
The situation of the art scene is interesting. Since the early 90s artists
have been instrumental in voicing discomfort with the unaddressed and taboo
chapter of the Lebanese civil war by asking for instance, how to mourn and
how to think life together after such traumatic events (Walid Sadek in
particular has addressed these questions in his work).
These art discourses, however, never overlapped with public ones. Artists
exist in parallel, think in parallel and although their production is
effective- its produces thought and acts on less tangible levels amongst a
community and at times a public- such production rarely acts on the topic it
addresses (Walid Raad’s reflections on historiography will never impact the
writing of Lebanese history).
I realize that this dilemma falls back into the art historical debate of
art’s relation to life, still I am confronted to this relation in ways that
very tangible; if a war erupts, should I continue filling fund applications?
It goes without saying that a war would interrupt any type of activities,
but I find that affirming art making in such conditions is particularly
confusing.

During the Egyptian revolution, artist and musician Ahmed Basiony was killed
in a protest. Paradoxically, it is this event- the killing of an artist whom
I didn’t personally know- that made the event more “real” to my eyes. The
fact that I reacted in such ways to his death because he was an artist
triggered a set of distributing questions; was it only through such tragic
events that art became “life”? Was art the only lenses through which I was
able to perceive something as “real”? Paradoxically precisely because of its
surreal quality (the symbolic sphere of art becomes the sphere of action). I
am trying to reflect on my own reaction without necessarily knowing what to
conclude.

Thank you for reading and looking forward to hear your comments,

Mirene
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