“Closer”

Lisa Steele bares her naked body to share twenty-seven years’ worth of scars and defects. Jill Magid writes letters to a former lover asking him to describe her face so a forensic artist can sketch her from his memories. Akram Zaatari unearths the journals he kept as a teenager to recall his experiences during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The eleven artists featured in “Closer,” an exhibition which marks the impressive inauguration of the Beirut Art Center, explore the liminal zone between private experience and public expression. The exhibition, in turn, raises a number of questions. Why do artists transform personal narratives into artworks? When do autobiographical accounts merit encounters with an unknown audience? How does intimacy translate?

The Beirut Art Center, located in a former furniture factory on the eastern edge of the city, is the first initiative of its kind in Lebanon, which, despite the existence of a lively and critical art scene, does not yet boast a modern or contemporary art museum and has a rickety infrastructure for cultural production at best. The center––with its nonprofit status, its noncommercial mandate, its decidedly democratic structure, and its desire for support from the local community––is positioning itself as a kind of alternative public space. This amplifies the concerns of “Closer” and adds another dimension to the exhibition’s work on the boundary between public and private.

But if the title of the show suggests a play on space, on abbreviating distances and bringing you, the viewer, closer, then the works hinge more meaningfully on time. From Jananne al-Ani’s marvelous five-screen video installation A Loving Man, 1996–99, to Anri Sala’s Intervista, 1998, and Tony Chakar’s 4 Cotton Underwear for Tony, 2000, “Closer” demands your presence for far longer than a passing glance.