BEIRUT ART CENTER APPOINTS HAIG AIVAZIAN AND AHMAD GHOSSEIN CODIRECTORS

Lebanese artists and curators Haig Aivazian and Ahmad Ghossein have been named the new codirectors of Beirut Art Center (BAC).

Ghossein is a filmmaker and artist who studied at the National Academy of Art in Oslo and the Lebanese University in Beirut. His work has been exhibited or screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Sharjah Art Foundation; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Oslo Kunstforening, Kunsthall, Oslo; the SeMA Biennale Mediacity, Seoul; the Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; the Beirut Film Festival; the Berlinale Film Festival, Berlin; and the Dubai Film Festival.

Aivazian studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Northwestern University, Chicago; and Concordia University, Montreal. His work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial; the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw.

“We want the BAC to be a contributor to the production of cultural knowledge, an incubator for all local artists, and be open to debates in arts and politics . . . [To] reflect on ongoing changes in the Arab world, and deconstruct the functionings of power and how it is exercised on precarious bodies,” Ghossein said of the appointment.

Aivazian added: “As practicing artists, we come to the BAC as we come to our own practices: with playful desire, but also many urgent questions. How can we gather an arsenal of aesthetic, conceptual, political and relational tools which would allow us to imagine and build new ways of being and thinking together? And how can such collective thought be firmly grounded in the context of Beirut, while avoiding provincial navel gazing and self-fetishization?”