BEIRUT ART CENTER

Wednesday March 11, 2009 at 8pm

Duration: 83 min.
Entrance: 3 000 LL

About the event

The first video program echoes the exhibition Closer. It features video works that shake our notions of reality by fictionalizing intimate stories and/or situating the artist as the subject/object of the work itself. Kerry Tribe’s The Audition Tapes is drawn from a story relating to her family and becomes, with the use of actors, a complex narrative and reflection on storytelling, revealing a dramatic event. Fouad El Koury records and reflects on two major episodes that changed his life: a family separation in Moving Out and a poetic record of his journey to Turkey that parallels his illness in Letters to Francine.

Kerry Tribe
The Audition Tapes (another home movie by Kerry Tribe)
Video, 20 min, English - 1998

The Audition Tapes documents the casting call for a project advertised in an acting magazine as "an experimental documentary on family history and memory." The monologues and dialogues the actors deliver — which sometimes appear as subtitles — were developed from transcribed interviews with members of my immediate family. Each of the fifteen actors included in the tape speaks as one of four real characters. Different accounts of the same events emerge and actors project their own desires and expectations onto the characters they portray.

Fouad Elkoury
Moving Out
Video, 20 min, French with English subtitles - 2004

The film portrays the separation of a family. A woman and her two children move out, leaving the father/ husband alone in their home. As the film follows two days of packing and moving, it reveals a history of tension and lovelessness.

Author and Director : Fouad Elkoury
Editor : Tina Baz / Image Editing : Franck Chafei
Production : Et Alors Productions

Fouad Elkoury
Letters to Francine
Video/Photography, 43 min, English - 2002

As a photographer, I went to Istanbul from December 1998 to October 2000, knowing nothing of Turkey. It unexpectedly changed the course of my life. The film is the story of that journey, but also, that of an illness, which I was diagnosed with at the end of my trip.
Intimate, this double track film is dominated by the feeling of discrepancy: discrepancy between the loneliness of the journey on the roads of Turkey and the imprisonment in the self-contained world of the house in Paris, discrepancy between the soundtrack and the still or animated images, discrepancy between the unavoidable subjection to the body and the spirit with which it competes, at least regarding the making of this film.

Author and Director : Fouad Elkoury
Editor : Tina Baz
Production : Et Alors Productions / Maison Européenne de la Photo

Kerry Tribe works primarily with video, film and installation. Her large-scale projects explore relationships between subjectivity and representation, often by investigating the gray areas between the authentic and the scripted or the collective and the idiosyncratic. She regularly invites the participation of colleagues, actors, strangers and technical professionals to produce ludic philosophical inquiries through structurally rigorous forms. Tribe's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; Kunst Werke, Berlin; and SMAK, Gent. She was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2005-2006, received her MFA from UCLA in 2002, was a Whitney Independent Study Program Fellow in 1997-98, and received her BA magna cum laude in Art and Semiotics from Brown University in 1997. Tribe currently splits her time between Los Angeles and Berlin.

Fouad Elkoury is born in 1952 in Paris of Lebanese parents, and lives between Paris, Beirut and Istanbul. He began his artistic career by photographing Beirut during the civil war, exploring issues of survival in a war-torn city. Far from being a report of everyday life, his pictures bear the necessity of withstanding time, as underlined in his publication Beyrouth Aller-Retour (1984), to be followed by a postwar work, Beirut City Centre (1992), which was widely exhibited and published in a book that became a landmark in the history of photography. Accounting for how to live in war zones while at the same time keeping a distance from everyday life marks his art, as can be seen in Palestine, l'envers du miroir (1996), Liban Provisoire (1998), or in his fictional narrative Suite Egyptienne (1999).
After co-founding the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, collecting and studying historical pictures of the region, Elkoury questioned the purpose of single photographic images, away from aestheticism. His later works elaborate composite visuals (diptychs, triptychs...) to create new meanings, combining still photography, text and video. His Paris exhibition Sombres at the Maison Européenne de la Photo, with its filmed counterpart Letters to Francine (2002), revolves around wounds; Civilisation, fake = real? ponders the phenomenon of representation and replication; On war and love (2006) reflects on the dimension of intimacy in wartime.