Lamia Joreige - Under-Writing Beirut: Past

Joreige’s series of drawings The River (2015-2017) are inspired from various maps of the river. In her three-channel video installation After the River (2016), she explores notions of borders and landscape and reflects on the diverse migrant population that has historically settled along the river’s banks. She studies the potential for gentrification of this area, one of the few remaining unexploited spaces in the capital. The area saw the rapid development of what has long been a derelict piece of land into a place of interest for art practitioners and recently, the site of high-rise residential constructions. The various plans to rehabilitate the river and the influx of refugees and migrants to the ever–expanding city make the future of the river and the fate of all the communities living in the area unknown.

It is in a similar spirit that the project Under-Writing Beirut takes up the histories and dynamics of Ouzai. For a long time, this area south of Beirut known as Roumoul (the dunes) was unoccupied and undefined. In the 1950s, as the city outgrew its ramparts, the land on its edges, useless for agriculture, became more valuable. The southern suburbs saw some substantial state investment as part of a growing, modernizing metropolis.

The first inhabitants of Ouzai were almost all rural Lebanese driven towards Beirut by a changing economy. From the nineteenth century onward, the continual lack of legal clarity over the ownership of land in Ouzai allowed the tension to fester in the 50’s, culminating in a trial, where it was finally decided that the land was private and not owned by the municipality of Bourj al Brajneh. This caused a spurt of informal (and, according to the decision of the trial, illegal) construction. The contested ownership, along with the weak regulatory power of the state and the fact that many properties were owned by a large number of co-owners, created a favorable ground for people who, looking for a better life near the capital or later fleeing the violence of the war, would settle there, most of them illegally.

The period preceding and during the Lebanese war saw a radical transformation of the area. The regular bombarding and then invasion
of the southern villages of Lebanon by Israel led to the displacement of thousands of villagers, mainly Shias. Many of them first settled in Beirut’s eastern suburbs, before they were forced to flee again during the civil war, which led to the partition of the capital. They then settled in the Southern suburbs of the city, now commonly called ‘Dahiye’. As a result, the area saw the solidification of a Shia community, and an even further densification of informal, mainly illegal constructions in Ouzai.
Today, the area is more heterogeneous than the common monolithic understanding of ‘Dahiye’ implies. In digging into Ouzai’s complex, multilayered history, the artist hopes to extend the reflection to larger ideas evoked by such a space. Indeed, Ouzai is a small area, which carries its own history, but somehow it seems to encompass the quintessence of what is facing all of Lebanon right now – issues of sectarian division, displacement, community, urban transformation, density of construction, inequality, reconciliation, etc.

Lamia Joreige

Lamia Joreige is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Beirut. She earned her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting and filmmaking. She uses archival documents and elements of fiction to reflect on history and its possible narration and on the relationship between individual stories and collective memory. Her practice, rooted in her country’s experience, explores the possibilities of representing the Lebanese wars and their aftermath, particularly in Beirut, a city at the center of her imagery.

Joreige’s artworks have been presented internationally in various exhibitions and venues, among which: The Istanbul Biennial, Centre Pompidou and Musée Nicéphore Niépce (France); Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the International Center of Photography, the New Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Taymour Grahne Gallery (US); Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Serpentine Gallery and Cardiff National Museum (UK); Sharjah Biennial (UAE) and Galerie Tanit and Art Factum (Lebanon).

She presented her films in festivals and venues such as FID Marseille; Medfilm Festival, Rome; Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Home Works I, IV & VII, Beirut; Paris Cinema; The Mediterranean Festival of Cinema, Montpellier; Beirut Cinema Days.
Her work is part of public and private collections across the world, such as Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris ; Tate Modern, London ; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah ; MATHAF, Doha ; Ars Aevi collection for Sarajevo Contemporary Art Museum, Sarajevo ; Nicéphore Niépce Museum, Chalon- Sur-Saone; Fonds régional d’art contemporain, Bretagne; Banque Libano- Francaise, Saradar Collection and Bank Audi, Beirut.

Lamia Joreige is the recipient of a fellowship at Columbia University Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris (2021).

She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the year 2016-2017 and was shortlisted for Artes Mundi 7, the United Kingdom’s leading biennial art prize.
She is a cofounder and board member of Beirut Art Center, which she codirected from 2009 to 2014