+ THE LOVERS
Ongoing project. First presented with Galerie Krinzinger in 2017 at Art Dubai. A lecture and installation have been presented at The Beirut Design Week in 2019.
The Lovers: Anatomy of Two Revolutions - Installation presented at the Beirut Design Week in June 2019
The Lovers is a multi-media installation exploring the lives of Georgina Rizk and Ali Hasan Salameh, lovers, revolutionaries and symbols of two presumably irreconcilable worlds. In 1971, at the age of eighteen, Georgina gained international recognition by becoming the first and only Arab to have ever won the Miss Universe Beauty Pageant. In 1972, at the age of thirty, the PLO’s Ali Hasan Salameh would attain international notoriety due to his alleged involvement in the massacre at the Munich Summer Olympics.
Anatomy of Two Revolutions - Lecture at the Beirut Design Week in Starco
How, where and when these two worlds of radical revolution and beauty met are questions at the heart of this investigation, which will lead us along the trajectories of Lebanon and Palestine, straight into one of the most convoluted conflicts of modern history: the Lebanese Civil War. Indeed, it was in the first year of that war that Georgina Rizk and Ali Hasan Salameh first met, fell in love and embarked on a relationship that was to end with his assassination by Mossad in 1979. This tragic tale of love and death is the thread we will follow in order to understand two movements shaking the Arab world at its core in the seventies: the Palestinian Revolution with its various political ramifications and the Sexual Liberation advocated for in the world of Arabic popular culture. Both these worlds were then based in Beirut, a single city sheltering the aspirations of radical revolutionaries and liberal capitalism, a single city mirroring all the tensions and contradictions of the world leading to a single catastrophic outcome. The ramifications of this story spread into our current history and can ultimately shed an invaluable light on this region of the world so often burdened with reductive clichés.
The Lovers - Panorama Box : 150 cm x 150 cm x 18 cm - Giclee print on canvas : 144 cm x 1200 cm
There are stories built on superlatives wherein the narrator uses gross exaggerations in order to embellish his tale. In this story there are no exaggerations: all the images and sounds that will unfold before your eyes and ears happened as recounted, everything is true and as such, it would be accurate to call this the greatest story ever told. The greatest is perhaps not the right adjective. The saddest, perhaps, the most complicated certainly and the most beautiful wherein beauty stands as an ode to survival and love. This story is called ‘The Lovers’ and it reconstructs a brief passage of time, perhaps the fraction of seconds it took for “the most beautiful woman in the universe” and “one of the world’s most dangerous men” to fall in love. Beyond this fraction of time, wars will unfold and the destinies of millions will be placed on the balance between life and death while love would violently carve its way into the most fratricidal of wars in the world’s most beautiful of countries. There are stories built on superlatives and that is just how this story begins.