27 June 2005
BEIRUT: The Airport Road, the Cola Bridge, the Corniche. Abdullah Kahil's photographs are full of recognizable landmarks. Yet the composite pictures that comprise his latest work, which closed at Espace SD on Saturday entitled "Ceci n'est pas Beyrouth (This is Not Beirut)," and soon to be on view there as part of the gallery's summer retrospective, seem to crank and churn this familiar urban imagery through the alienating and disorienting lens of a strange and sinister kaleidoscope. Kahil takes a single picture, flips it, repeats it, and multiplies it into a pattern. An image that may have been penetrable becomes resilient, opaque, and unrecognizable.
Because changing cities are interesting cities, Beirut's reconstruction project has inspired and informed the work of numerous visual artists. Many, such as Jayce Salloum, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre and more, have taken a critical approach, delving into issues of representation as they relate to Lebanon's complex political predicament.
Kahil, on the other hand, is after something else. "I'm not talking about the renovation of Downtown," he says.
The "ceci n'est pas" of his title references Beirut only incidentally. The source, for him (like others elsewhere before him from Michel Foucault on down), is really Rene Magritte, the Belgian painter's famous painting "The Treachery of Images" of a pipe and the words "ceci n'est pas une pipe," and the idea that the image of the thing is not the thing itself.
"The title doesn't have a literal meaning," he explains, "in saying that I came back to Beirut and this is not the Beirut that I knew. I mean I have memories but I don't attach sentiment to them. I was not intending to present any criticism or any attitude toward what happened to the city. All that I'm doing is making some patterns of the things that we like and we don't like."
Kahil returned to Lebanon in 2003 after two decades in the U.S., where he studied painting and printmaking at New York's Pratt Institute before pursuing a masters and a doctorate at New York University's Institute of Fine Art. He now teaches painting and drawing at the Lebanese University and the history of art and architecture at the Lebanese American University and did a brief stint as a caricaturist for a magazine published by stalwart newspaper An-Nahar.
When Kahil came back to Lebanon, he lived with his brothers in Nabatiyeh, where he was born, before getting his own place in Beirut's trendy Verdun. Squished among a desk, a bed, and the 400 boxes of books he brought with him from New York, Kahil had no room to paint. He would go to Beirut, take pictures with a digital camera, return to Nabatiyeh, and download the images onto a computer, solely for the sake of saving space. But he had been messing around with PhotoShop since 1991. He had also been experimenting with arranging images of the body into the patterns of Islamic art. Unsatisfied with those works, he soon turned to his city pictures.
"I have a huge stock of photos from everywhere, taken from my travels, taken for art history purposes, for teaching. These photos," he says, gesturing toward his exhibition at the gallery, "the idea of showing them was by coincidence, but the idea of doing them has been in the making for a long time."
At the time of his first forays into the digital manipulation of images, he explains, "there was a lot of talk about whether the computer could be used for art or not. So I kept doing things. The degree of their success I can't judge, because none of them have been shown and they are not consistent. But there is a certain question. Because I was studying Islamic art, and I got really deep in my studies, and I learned some of the techniques that Islamic designers used to use, there is a very simple idea," he says, "which is to create a motif or a unit that doesn't make any sense by itself, but once you mirror-image it and repeat it, it creates a certain pattern. So in my mind, I was trying to see whether we could use motifs from our lives, and see whether I could transform them into patterns."
Kahil eventually amassed a collection of over 4,000 urban images. He made 120 of what he calls compositions or constructions. With Sandra Dagher, Espace SD's director, he narrowed the field down to 47, and eventually picked 30 for the exhibition. The results are dizzying - large prints mounted on foam core featuring endless repetitions of highway overpasses, traffic medians, street corners, and more. To enter the show is like stepping into Beirut filtered through five fun-house mirrors at once.
"My interference is very simple," Kahil says. "It consists of taking the picture, making a mirror image, repeating it horizontally, then repeating it vertically, and closing the file.
For all its patterning, to write off Kahil's work as just decorative is probably too easy. There is, clearly, an issue at work about the presence of the body in the urban environment. Kahil doesn't drive and says he finds the Lebanese culture of the car absurd. There is also, it seems, an issue at work about the ability to puncture, literally or metaphorically, the surface of the city. Kahil says it was important for him not to create new space with his repetitions, to make sure the viewer felt frustration when viewing them, an anxiety over where to go, how to enter and engage with these works.
By his own admission, Kahil's exhibition is something of a test. "I'm not sure whether this was work you could call art or just someone playing," he says. "I did not intend to make a photography exhibition. I simply wanted to paint with the camera."
Selected images from Abdullah Kahil's "Ceci n'est pas Beyrouth (This is Not Beirut)" are on view at Espace SD in Gemmayzeh for the gallery's summer group show, opening June 29. For more information, call +961 1 563 114.
