136 | Harper’s BAZAAR ART | AUTUMN 2012

REVIEW

By its close on July 8th, the fi rst edition of the Beirut Art Fair (previously known as the MENASA Art Fair) had attracted some 22,500 visitors in a four-day event that featured 43 galleries from around the world. Nearly all the major Lebanese galleries were there, maintaining market presence – except of course for Sfeir-Semler Gallery, the Hamburg/Beirut-based gallery, as ever in a

class of her own, boasting a presence at Art Basel, not to mention representing all invited Lebanese artists at dOCUMENTA 13 (as well as the Palestinian Khalil Rabah and the Egyptian Wael Shawky). Nearly a week later, opening night at the Ashkal Alwan Open Studio would attract prestigious artists such as Akram Zaatari, Rabih Mroueh, Emily Jacir, Walid Sadek and Walid Raad, most of whom would most likely never set foot at BAF (although Marwan Rechmaoui – also represented by Andrée Sfeir-Semler – was seen visiting the Fair on its last day, perhaps out of curiosity).

Of the 27 ‘top-notch’ galleries added to last year’s number, eight were design galleries; not enough to make BAF an art and design fair, no doubt thanks to the organisers’ logic that ‘good design is just art’. The same logic was used for a comics exhibition curated by Pascal Odille (the Fair’s art director) on two sides of the outer wall of the VIP lounge, where a post-2006 work by Zeina El Khalil portraying Hassan Nasrallah as a pop star was forcibly taken down at one point, adding a twist to the exhibition next door, ‘This Is Not Wonderland’ (also conceived by Odille), that showcased, among others, an installation by Anita Toutikian. Toutikan has been invited regularly by Laure d’Hauteville (BAF’s manager) from the fi rst Fair the latter organised in Beirut, ARTUEL in 1998, which morphed into ARTSUD, which d’Hauteville organised every year until 2005 and the Hariri assassination.

LEBANON

BEIRUT ART FAIR Georges H Rabbath was one of the 22,500 guests of this year’s revamped Beirut Art Fair (previewed in Harper’s Bazaar Art #3). He ponders whether this small Fair really has what it takes to emerge as a serious player on the Middle Eastern art scene ...

Toutikian’s work was about her friend Mario Saba, who died last year, and whom Toutikian recognised to be one of the fi rst installation artists in Beirut. ‘There was only the two of us’, Toutikian insisted, as she sat across from another historical reference: the Janine Rubeiz Gallery owned by Rubeiz’s daughter Nadine Begdache. Begdache has ‘done so much for art in Lebanon’ , according to the visiting Christine Tohme.

Tohme, director of Ashkal Alwan and Home Workspace (and an impressive #72 in the 2011 ArtReview Power List) was probably there to see Catherine David’s curating of Marwan Kassab Bachi’s correspondence with poet Abdulrahman Munif. Tohme found this to her liking, but no offi cial comments could be taken about the rest of the Fair – although she might have liked Ali Cherri’s video (that had been exhibited at last year’s Beirut Art Centre’s ‘Exposure’), had she been able to fi nd the ‘Video Box’.

One cannot earnestly relay Tohme’s inner thoughts about whether a gallery such as Janine Rubeiz should be present at the Fair; or even Saleh Barakat’s Agial gallery for that matter (Barakat, incidentally, was helped in his early shows by Begdache in 1995). Right next to Agial sat some newly- popped art galleries from Lebanon and seven European galleries representing artists from a redefi ned MENASA region (Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, the UAE … and Sudan). There was also ChinaToday Gallery from Brussels, working exclusively with Chinese artists, as well as a much-feted Warhol (a portrait of 1970s American starlet Barbara Molasky) from Galeria Cordeiros of Portugal.

As last year, David took part in the series of ‘roundtable’ talks. A high point was Yoyo Maeght’s recollection of her memories of Mirò and Calder. Another was Marwan Kassab Bachi, speaking of his lifetime journey through painting and of his memories of his late friend the novelist Abdelrahman Munif. It was fascinating – at least when he wasn’t being interrupted by Fawwaz Trabousli, or thrown off track by the late announcement of the talk over the PA system. Seeing the venerable, if frail, Bachi talking was rare and moving, and there was a rush of buyers proffering his book for his signature afterwards. Another high point was the roundtable about media and art, in which art-publishing professionals all agreed that there was still no real art criticism in the MENASA region.

At the MENASAART fair last year, David argued for preserving spaces for art production such as Ashkal Alwan, or the abutting Beirut Art Centre, from growing market forces. It is obvious a divide is present, judging from the members of the ‘collectors committee’, whose names were mentioned at the beginning of the catalogue (apparently with no other responsibility than to attend an exclusive preview), and the list of supporters of the Beirut Art Centre, for example. Few intersections between the lists could be found. Evidently (art) worlds are parting in Beirut, and in the region, all the more to collide later on maybe, or at least to mix. Whether such a thing is good or bad is anyone’s guess. HBA

‘My Pain Is Real’ Ali Cherry (2010, Courtesy Galerie Imane Farés-France)

The ‘I Want to Live Again’ installation, 2012, by Anita Toutikian was showcased in the ‘This Is Not Wonderland’ exhibition.