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L'Orient-Le Jour

With 'The Widows,' Alfred Tarazi casts light on the repressed and launches Blue Rose space

The place is tiny, about 30 square meters with a mezzanine. It sits on the west side of Shehadeh Street, which climbs up from Tabaris, across from the Wine Bar that is struggling to regain its loyal following of yesteryear. Besides, the owner of this former depot, Walid Ataya, is delighted to see the street buzzing with life again and gives his full support to the project being developed there. Caroline Tarazi sees far beyond the three walls of this modest space. She just launched, under the rock-inspired name "Blue Rose," a cultural platform open to all artistic disciplines. Her goal was to foster the emergence of new talent in collaboration with established artists. And it was with an exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Alfred Tarazi — her ally, as one would say of cousins, and also her first "resident" — that she launched this adventure with a bang. In junkyards, the gold of dreams Alfred traces, among ruins and waste, the ruptures and romances of the Arab world. For 20 years, he has obsessively collected the materials for his works — rare archives that become the vocabulary of his artistic language. Beyond his cylinder boxes that unfurl digitized collages of old newspaper clippings and yellowed photos, the artist, born in 1980, digs through the ashes of a collective memory repressed down to the bones of oblivion. The "shadow" he said, in the Jungian sense, appears between history and myth. "A poetic act of historical preservation," he stated, standing before dense works that span video, photography, sculpture, installations, and film. Trained amid the dark backdrop of the Lebanese civil war, Alfred's visual language questions how memory is recorded, manipulated, mythified, or forgotten. His immersive works blur the boundaries between personal memories and national archives, where history and myth collide and where the unresolved past echoes into the present. Where else to find a city's spillages and little secrets if not in junkyards? Alfred haunts the one in Sabra, where, between compressed cans and used engine filters, he finds the gold of his dreams. The shapes and the words of a grieving city At the entrance of Blue Rose stands the silhouette of what looks like a fortified city. Cylindrical perfume containers, made of perforated aluminum and welded together, rise up like an abandoned city. The exhibition is titled "The Widows." "It's about the mourning of a city," said Alfred. Before crossing into the space where an aluminum sculpture of a Phoenician theater — its plans retraced by Charles Qorm — sits at the end, visitors stop before this mysterious monument, haunted by the absence of life it embodies. It is surrounded by relief panels where side partitions encircle a celestial body shaped from the base of the perfume bottles. The background is corten — a plate of rusted metal; the partitions, also rusted metal, recreate friezes of Lebanese architectural arcades. This scenography hosts small, green-bronze figurines, cast in molds previously used by the Tarazi family in their extensive craftsmanship. Amid this lineup of small temples, in two sizes and various versions, one's eyes are drawn by silver stems leaning in perfect expression of silent pain. "Galvanized copper," said Alfred, explaining that he asked a craftsman to leave these stems in their silver bath between two electrodes for two years, "to see what would happen." The result is surprising: globular, anthropomorphic accumulations sketch bodies in prayer and alien heads — the widows of wounded cities. Each panel is engraved with a line from one of Alfred's poems, which comprises 18 verses: "Motionless moon/ While the city fades/ Widows embrace/ In a landscape in ruins/ Motionless moon/ Where cities once stood/ They mourn/ The absence of man/ Motionless moon/ To remember/ The distant sound of life/ Whispers and screams/ Leaning widows/ Bearing the memory of life/ The madness of construction/ The drunken haze of the living/ The fall of man/ Motionless moon." Tonal violence and innocent cynicism The chromed Phoenician theater, the latest of these magic boxes dear to Alfred, is called "Beirut Zoo," and its theme strikes harshly. Amid the stream of images appears the charismatic leader and president, Bashir Gemayel. He is surrounded by a stampede of zebras and various wild animals. The meaning is one of those nightmares best kept locked away: in 1982, shortly before being elected president, Gemayel promised Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Prime Minister, who was criticizing him for lukewarm cooperation, that he would turn the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila — one into a zoo, the other into a parking lot. There you have it. Some contexts awaken a stranger inside you. At the bottom of the piece, you can unwind a perforated strip depicting fighters. It plays on a music box, in childlike notes, the melody of " Li Beirut" (For Beirut). There is in Alfred's approach a tonal violence, an innocent cynicism that simply calls for catharsis. His drop of water, like a hummingbird, for collective mental health. This rust that sticks to your heart On the mezzanine, a hypnotic video projects a layered animation of the exhibited works. Through collages and lighting, the same tinplate moon rises over the same enlarged arcades, revealing their countless shapes. A dystopia whose light remains ambiguous, evoking a deep melancholy sourced from nowhere else but this hollow moon and these rusted windows, these stems shaped like weeping women, and this rust that sticks to your heart. A powerful and salutary exhibition that marks the start of a promising cultural project, meant for a new generation less anesthetized than the previous ones.