Coming up!

Art, Ecology and the Commons: Together in Agony we Persist
August 27, 2021 - September 5, 2021

As we continue to face these dismal times, one thing is certain for TAP: we are determined to support our community and sustain our local ecosystem the best way we know how. In times of deadlock, we refuse to stand still and divided, and instead choose to come together to harness solidarity and practice care amidst our collective struggle.

Our 10-day study will bring together contributors of diverse backgrounds based in Lebanon and the Arab Region, interested in harnessing togetherness and exchange to reflect on our current environment and foster recovery in a time of extreme crisis, by engaging with and drawing inspiration from a resilient collaborative network: a forest, like us, growing and thriving despite an extremely hostile, polluted, and broken environment. A parallel public program will punctuate the project and engage the surrounding community with events, workshops, talks and film screenings addressing the themes.

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For more information, please visit our website.

In collaboration with theOtherDada, this program is supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), the French Institute, SUGi, the Municipality of Sin El Fil, Bossa Nova Beirut Hotel, Metropolis, Advanced Car Rental, and lit by Light for Lebanon.

Thank you for joining us to take care of our forest last month!

What if you could sit by Beirut’s river?

"Our young forest by the bank of the river turned two last month, and I absolutely had to be there. I had never seen the Beirut river up close. Pitchers of cold organic iced tea making their way along the path through the forest, a wooden table, borrowed tableware from the neighbors and traditional textiles blanketing the tall grasses were enough to host the people who attended. The forest turned two and our project, Art, Ecology and the Commons was born.

Intrigued by this urban interstice where a forest has been thriving and existing for the past two years through the efforts of theOtherDada team and a community of volunteers, participants speculated on the

fate of this land and the river: Sirene stood on a pile of dried grass for a better view, while Charbel imagined an excavation act to reach draining holes, the only pores of the massive concrete walls bounding the river. As we came together to take care of this forest, weeding, composting and interacting with its various facets, it was evident that not only plants are craving contact with the river, but humans too…"

– Jad Karam 
TAP member 

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Stay tuned for our collective study,
August 27, 2021 - September 5, 2021. 

For more information on Art, Ecology and the Commons, please visit our website.

A Billboard Commission to Nasri Sayegh

Taking over the edges of the Beirut RiverLESS forest, we invited Nasri Sayegh to intervene on a billboard. Challenging the clear-cut line between art and design, the multidisciplinary artist subverts the traditional advertising function of the installation. Through his project, Paysages Exquis, he blurs as much as outlines the frontier between the highway and sylvestrian landscape. The billboard commission was inaugurated on Saturday, June 12.


We had a quick chat with the artist  >>>
 

How do you see this commissioned project resonating within the context of Art, Ecology and the Commons? 

When invited by TAP to intervene on this billboard, I spontaneously thought about using it to “write a message”. Using letters. Words. But no word could fathom the extent of the catastrophe we are currently witnessing and living. I then decided to take refuge in my forest of images. To choose the solitude of bare landscapes. The nudity of images as opposed to the mundane aspect of words and messages. Granting a billboard the status of receptacle of landscapes, I chose to juxtapose Forêt de Fontainebleau (1846), a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, a pivotal figure of landscape painting, with an old slide from my archive collection showing a forest in Germany. It is not so much the origin of these images that interests me, but rather their belonging to what I would call a world-geography (géographie-monde). My fascination with landscapes transcends borders and geographies and times. This diptych is taken from my research project entitled Paysages Exquis.

How did this project emerge? Was it more responsive to an external context or an internal impulse? 

The dictionary of the French Academy defines the masculine noun "landscape" as follows:
- The extent of a territory that the eye can embrace.
- Extended area whose appearance is specific to a place, to a region, which presents particular characters.

- Graphic or pictorial work taking as subject the representation, the description of natural sites. By extension. The genre consists of works where the representation of nature is not taken for decoration but is the motive, the main subject.
- Set of phenomena, a combination of elements that are offered to observation, to reflection.

Paysages Exquis [Exquisite Landscapes] is a research, an attempt to make sense of my incurable obsession with the landscape. Is this an operation of displacement through collage and other incongruous and sometimes exquisite marriage of images?

A surreal apposition of images in service of a new narration, another history, an after-image? Whether via mobile phones, cameras – be they digital, disposable or instant  – or medical imaging (as I sometimes probe my own interior landscapes using MRI and other kinds of X-rays), all mediums are crucial to attempt the image and exhaust the motif. In the footsteps of Aby Warburg and Roland Barthes, Paysages Exquis presents itself as an essay with the inner ambition to construct a new atlas.

How does Paysages Exquis, originally a photography project, morph under the new context of the billboard as a graphic commercial medium? Does it subvert it?

JOIN US FOR A LIVE TALK WITH OPAVIVARÁ!

July 22, 2021 / 3:00 pm Brazil, 9:00 pm Beirut
Youtube live stream here.

After more than a year away from the streets, the carioca artist collective OPAVIVARÁ! returned to occupy the streets of Rio de Janeiro with an artistic intervention consisting of water distribution to the homeless community of the city center. 

Tune in to learn more about the Bem Comum project with TAP curator Amanda Abi Khalil in conversation with OPAVIVARÁ! carioca art collective, as they speak about the four iterations of this public space intervention commissioned by TAP in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut.

OPAVIVARÁ! is an art collective from Rio de Janeiro acting in public spaces of cities, galleries and cultural institutions, questioning the use of private and public spaces, through the creation of relational objects that provide collective experience. Since its creation in 2005, the

group has been creating situations that activate and increase the power of life: how to drink and dance together, or celebrate any day gathered in the square, at the beach or on the street, like a carnival out of season, feeding and spreading the transformational power through pleasure…

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For more information on Bem Comum, please visit our website.

*This public intervention was activated four times on the following dates, with a departure from Praça XV: June 12, 19, 26 and July 3, 2021

Check out our IGTV to watch 4 hours of Bem Comum unfold in 1 minute!
 

We...Survive

REDEEM
Künstlerhof Frohnau, Berlin / June 30, 2021 - July 4, 2021

As part of our current inquiry on care, solidarity and collaborations put in practice through curatorial projects and cross-cultural exchange, as well as our interest in speculative practices and gatherings as formats, TAP’s curator Amanda Abi Khalil joined "We...survive" a five-day workshop in Berlin organized by REDEEM, a newly launched platform for ongoing conversations between voices from Beirut living in Berlin and around the world. The workshop, hosted by artist residency space Künstlerhof Frohnau and a forest, brought together twenty participants and guests, for group conversations, collective cooking, forest walks and late night murmurs. 

Participants and guests included, among others, Siska, Jens Maier Rothe, Laure de Selys, Yalda Younes, Zeina Hanna, Franziska Pierwoss, Leil-Zahra Mortada, Nancy Naser Al-Deen, Christel Salem, Philip Widman, Amanda Abi Khalil, Setareh Shahbazi….  

REDEEM acts upon a collaborative desire to amplify and deepen an already existing exchange between the Lebanese artist diaspora in Berlin, and German and international artists who lived and worked in Beirut before the country plunged into its current economic and political crisis. Redeem aims to build a temporary framework of exchange through which they can be widely heard and inspired by each other. To that end, it supplies both runway and refuge for diverse artistic positions within the context of a workshop, a commissioned podcast series, and a series of film screenings and talks. 

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Stay tuned for exciting reveals
in the coming months!

TAP goes to Alès

Cratère Surfaces International Outdoor Festival
Alès, France / June 29, 2021 - July 3, 2021

TAP took part in the Cratère Surfaces International Outdoor Festival in Alès in the south of France with the support of the French Institute, the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Culture.

This was an invaluable networking opportunity for our institution, aiming at fostering more cross-cultural collaborations between Lebanon and other cities, as well as interdisciplinary projects across the visual and performing arts. More than 150 professionals, curators and festival programmers met to

discuss art in public spaces through roundtables and presentations.

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Photo credit © Yann Riché

TAP needs your support. 
 

TAP (Temporary Art Platform) is a nonprofit organization committed to making another world possible, by affecting social change through contemporary art. Founded in a region of unrelenting volatility and absent cultural policies, TAP curates the conditions for communities, private bodies and governmental institutions to recognize that contemporary artists can be allies in driving enduring social change amidst precarious contexts. In the process, TAP creates accessible tools and production opportunities for contemporary artists, whilst rendering their practice porous and participatory, within and beyond the field of art.

We have been facing an unprecedented deficit, threatening the sustainability of our institution since the beginning of the global and Lebanese economic crisis. We are however committed, more than ever, to making another world possible, by mediating exchange and prompting the unexpected.

No donation is small.
Become a TAP supporter so that we can persist with wonder, and without compromise.
Donate here.

Contact us on together@temporaryartplatform.com for more information.