Paola Yacoub

The Beirut- and Berlin-based artist Paola Yacoub is best known for her collaborations with the French artist and architect Michel Lasserre. Since 2000, they have produced numerous projects that place words and images in curious conversation. Their self-described “synoptic pictures” and “elegiac landscapes” pair unspectacular, panoramic shots of Beirut and South Lebanon with texts of varying lengths, from brisk captions to expansive essays. Inextricably linked to the politics of Beirut’s postwar reconstruction, these works explore how a few words, paragraphs, or pages drastically alter one’s perception of an image, a territory, or a long, drawn-out history. The point is to initiate a series of interpretive acts, or what the artists call “a game of retorts.”

This exhibition, which is Yacoub’s first solo show in Lebanon––and also her first large-scale, midcareer survey––restages several of these series but also presents a staggering accumulation of earlier works, many of which have never been exhibited before. Titled “Drawing with the Things Themselves” and curated by Corinne Diserens, the presentation fills two long hallways and moves chronologically through Yacoub’s oeuvre––from the test prints, contact sheets, and wax sculptures that shaped her experiments as an artist and architecture student in London to the drawings, collages, and Polaroids dating from her days working on archaeological excavations in downtown Beirut, at a time when the area had been torn open by warring factions and real estate developers in turn.

One of the four glass-covered display cases, each the size of a funerary slab, holds a mesmerizing collection of waferlike discs––casts of bullet holes taken from a wall that once ran along the green line separating East Beirut from West. Nearby, one sees a work that consists of strangely poetic instructions for catching raindrops in cement, typed on a white sheet of paper affixed with a black-and-white photograph of dappled concrete. Yacoub’s work with Lasserre is notably austere and nearly immaterial. Her solo projects, however, are messier and more tactile, with a post-punk aesthetic that wonderfully complicates the clean, formal clarity usually associated with the so-called Beirut school.