Before the Cypress Broke
Apr 17 - Jun 5, 2021
Void Gallery
Ali Cherri I Ayla Hibri I Charbel Haber I Daniele Genadry I Fiona Ones I Gregory Buchakjian & Valérie Cachard I Hussein Nassereddine I Jacques Vartabedian I Omar Khouri I Salah Missi I Sandrine Pelletier I Sirine Fattouh & Stéphanie Dadour I Ziad Antar
*The proceeds from the sales of works will go towards the BAR Support Fund and the participating artists. For individual donations, click here.
The exhibition Before the Cypress Broke brings together new and existing works spanning the flourishing artistic period that Lebanon has known in the past years up until its near demise on August 4, 2020.
This unfathomable day, lurking in the background of the city like a shadow, profoundly changed the lives of all Lebanese people - intensifying the already existing distress in the country and the growing despair abroad. The premise of this exhibition was explored in retrospect, with the urge to question:
How did we get here?
It borrows its title from a poem by one of the Arab world’s greatest contemporary poets Mahmoud Darwish whose poem The Cypress Broke resonates as a lament over the death of a cypress, a ruin in the making. The poem is a conversation around grief, its irreversible nature, and the relentless course of life.
About Void
Void is a contemporary art gallery that commissions and produces a visual arts programme that aims to challenge their audience and promote the arts to new and existing audiences. The programme supports a diverse range of artistic practices of national and international artists.
The programme focuses on the collaborative nature of art and its ability to add to artistic discourse through exhibitions, events, discussions and partnerships. Through their commissions they work with a network of arts organisations both nationally and internationally to create specific projects.
A key element of the gallery is Void Engage, their learning and outreach programme, which places participation and engagement at the heart of Void, making contemporary visual art accessible to visitors of all ages.
Photos above by Harry Kerr, courtesy of Void Gallery
Film Programme
Concurrent with Before The Cypress Broke, four films curated by Jowe Harfouche, Executive Director of the Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS), will be screened virtually on select dates throughout the exhibition.
This program showcases four films from Lebanon that predate the moment of extreme collapse and systemic unraveling the country has been enduring. Together, these documentaries render a portrait of Beirut, euphoric, oppressive, anxious, nostalgic, that unsettles the 'before and after' dichotomy. Each of them plays this not-so-incidental double role of archiving a very precise moment in our modern past all the while speculating potentialities for our future. From depicting marginalisation across sect and class to the histories of political organising and rebellion against neoliberal and authoritarian practices, to the fears and dreams of the residents of Beirut under a sycophantic regime, these four films, that also question and rethink the documentary form while they're at it, are ever so timely.
- Jowe Harfouche
Past & upcoming screenings
April 10 | 74 The Reconstitution Of A Struggle (2012) by Rania and Raed Rafei
April 24 | Guardians of Time Lost (2013) by Diala Kashmar
May 8 | Birds of September (2013) by Sarah Francis
May 22 | A Feeling Greater Than Love (2017) by Mary Jirmanus Saba