21 June 2011
BEIRUT: Some decades ago, legend has it, an American engineer and inventor named Buckminster Fuller asked a novel question. “How much does your house weigh?
” In response, a few eyebrows were cocked in that “Geeze, I’d never thought of it that way before” sort of way.Fuller had an agenda. He was the inventor, and main advocate, of the “geodesic dome” – an architectural form that, he believed, could combine structural integrity with lightweight building materials.
Things that looked like geodesic domes began cropping up in North American cultural production, especially science fiction movies. One film hypothesised that future cities would be protected by (and imprisoned within) such domes. Another suggested that, in the wake of runaway capitalism, the remains of the planet’s forests would be transplanted into domes and sent into orbit. One Canadian television series stuffed the shards of human civilization into domes and fired them into deep space.
Yet geodesic domes never became a feature of the American landscape, or anyplace else. In the minds of their Canadian and Mexican neighbors, Americans are more likely to be associated with football stadia or shopping malls than geodesic domes.
This sort of idle rumination about national perceptions and architecture may spring to mind if you find yourself at the Agial Gallery, which is nowadays displaying “Zinco, Barbwire and Freedom,” an exhibition of work by 28-year-old Abdulrahman Katanani.
For those familiar with Lebanon’s urban landscape, the title of Katanani’s show will be enough to know that it somehow takes its inspiration from the Palestinian experience.
The refugee community in this country has historically come to be associated with barbwire and “zinco,” though not by their own choice.
Katanani’s pieces are figurative, all representing children at play. One piece depicts a boy and a girl chasing after a chicken. A work portrays some children skipping rope. Another is a rendition of that game where four youngsters hold a blanket and throw another kid up in the air repeatedly.
The work might be thought of as a sort of naïf sculpture – Katanani holds a diploma in painting and sculpture from the Lebanese University’s institute of fine arts, where he’s presently finishing a master’s degree.
All the objects are made of metal. The bodies of the children are cut from sheets of corrugated tin. Metal bottle caps and crushed metal buckets – standing in for ribbons and ball caps – provide dashes of colour to the otherwise monochrome and featureless figures.
The “blanket” that throws one little girl into the air is made of a length of chain-link fence. The skipping rope used by three other youngsters is actually a length of barbwire.
Katanani’s choice of media may seem peculiar to anyone innocent of recent local history. Indeed, a good case could be made that using such tough, rigid and sharp-edged materials to depict the energetic, pliable vulnerability of children is utterly inappropriate.
It is helpful to know that Katanani was born and raised in Sabra refugee camp, on the southern edge of municipal Beirut. The word Sabra should ring some bells. In 1982 the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were the site of one of several notorious acts of mass murder to take place during Lebanon’s long Civil War.
The camps’ historical notoriety has ensured that, if it becomes the stuff of cultural production – an art more ambitious than a Palestinian dabke performance or handicraft representations of the map of Palestine – it tends to reflect back upon this singular disaster.
In his overrated animated film “Waltz with Bashir,” Israeli writer-director Ari Folman appropriates the Sabra-Shatila massacre (which the Israeli Army facilitated), or rather an Israeli soldier’s misplaced recollection of it, to absolve his Israeli audience of any responsibility for the event.
Occasionally an artist has attempted to liberate the camps of their legacy of mass murder – as with Maher Abi Samra’s documentary “Rond-Point Shatila,” which looks past the history of the place to capture the state of suspension and lassitude that weighs upon daily life in the camp.
Katanani too wants to use the stuff of the camp to make a work representative of something other than helplessness and misery.
The “zinco,” the strips of corrugated tin with which he works, does have great historical resonance, having been used to roof the semi-permanent structures erected to house the Palestinian refugees who fled to Lebanon after the Nakba.
Like the barbwire and chain-link fencing that Katanani uses, “zinco” has become one of the narrative tropes of Palestinian exile to, and incarceration in, this country.
The aesthetic effectiveness is debatable. Its main virtue lies in the brief satisfaction that arises in the spectator once you realise what it is you’re looking at.
The effect of using such media to depict carefree, youthful innocence is ambivalent. The work seems to want to depict the children to be literally as resilient as the tin they’re made of. On the other hand, the incongruity between the subject and the material used to depict them is so incongruous as to be dehumanizing.
The truth in these renderings errs on the side of the political, rather than the aesthetic. Yet if the work seems formally literal or awkward, it also has an evident appeal – the Agial’s Saleh Barakat confided that most of the works were sold before the exhibition even opened.
Abdulrahman Katanani’s “Zinco, Barbwire and Freedom” is up at the Agial Gallery until Jun 25. For more information call 01-345-213.
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
