+ In a sea of oblivion
Installation presented in 2010 in the Ruin of the Beirut City Centre.
To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War a large-scale installation was presented in the disaffected ruin of The City Centre also known as The Dome in downtown Beirut.
The human toll of the Lebanese Civil War is devastating. More than two hundred thousand killed and seventeen thousand missing. Not a single Lebanese family has been spared. In A Sea Of Oblivion raised the crucial question as to why no national memorial had been raised to commemorate these people. Facing this generalized amnesia the exhibition initiated a multi-layered process of writing. The first aimed to collect the identities of the victims of these wars. Visitors were invited to write onto a large grid made of two hundred thousand squares the names and memories of victims. They were also invited to record over a twenty second span these memories. On a second ground the exhibition proposed the site of the installation itself to become a permanent vessel to host memorial practices related to the war. The ruin of the Beirut City Centre also known as The Dome, this disaffected modernist cinema and one of the last ruins of the civil war in downtown Beirut should itself become a memorial, an empty space that could be reinterpreted every year by different artists.
images of the victims of the civil war