Alternative Remembrances

Memory of the civil war in Lebanon is fractured if not completely broken, and its history remains officially unwritten. A lack of reconciliation or peace-building initiatives suggests that the causes for the conflict have simply been masked or ignored rather than cured. Existing scholarship has examined the absence of a national collective memory or unified history in Lebanon, with some speculation that the persistent fault lines in the country’s multi-factional and multi-religious society may lead to a relapse of the violence. While there have been some curatorial endeavors in the field, little popular criticism and even less academic writing focuses on contemporary visual culture in Lebanon or the wider Middle East. It is only in recent years that due attention has been paid to the vibrant art scene in the region, and the dearth in critical material has been addressed. With this in mind, this paper aims to contribute to the wider burgeoning conversation about critical art practices in the Middle East. In analyzing the work of three Lebanese ‘post-war’ artists, questions about the nature of wartime history and memory are asked in relation to visual culture. The article asks what art is doing in the context of Lebanese post-war society, and while it may not be possible to answer this question fully, there is an underlying need to re-evaluate the way the arts are viewed in contemporary discourse, as pioneered by Jacques Ranciere and Jill Bennet, among others

Aesthetics · Art · Collective memory · Context (archaeology · Conversation · Criticism · Media studies · Middle East · Political science · Relation (database · Scholarship · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · The arts · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Public Spaces through Art