A Continuum of Human-Nature
A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on March 09, 2018, on page 16.
BEIRUT: “Does my country of origin even matter?” Lebanese-born artist Ramzi Mallat asks. “If you can get through your cultural baggage ... you’re elevating your country.” He notes that art in or from Lebanon is often criticized in political rather than artistic terms and that his work is often “miscarried, broken-down and unappreciated [while] foreign artists are treated like diamonds transported on feathers.”
Mallat doesn’t feel defined by his nationality. Though he believes he doesn’t “come off as a typical Lebanese person,” he feels that he should “give back to the country that gave [him] everything.”
The artist is nowadays giving back with “Unearthed,” the inaugural exhibition in a recently-constructed building at the edge of Beirut Digital District whose cylindrical form and polished surface clash with the backdrop of Al-Khandaq al-Ghamiq – a neglected neighborhood on the fringes of downtown Beirut.
The temporary home for Instituto Cervantes de Beirut – dedicated to the dissemination of Spanish language and the culture of Spanish-speaking countries – the cylinder is an appropriate space for “Unearthed,” Mallat says, as it “broke a mould of the conventional art space.”
His idea was to present art in an educational space and break conventional “consumerist and commercialist ideas about art” and art spaces.
Upon walking in – and being scanned by a metal detector – the public can either follow a winding staircase down, steer right to be greeted by a sculpture triptych, or continue straight ahead toward a wall-sized series of photo diptychs called “Continuum.”
The series is comprised of five large-scale photos of body parts, each juxtaposed with landscapes and other shots from nature, the latter captured in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
The series, he says, has been selected from a trove of a large number of attempts. The work revolves around a symbiosis with an emphasis on “the regenerative and destructive elements [of] nature and the human body.”
A leaf bends like a curved spine. An elbow forms a peak resembling a mountainous horizon. Stretch marks on skin aren’t unlike the cracks on tree bark. All link human attributes to other natural phenomena and highlight interconnectivity.
The body parts belong to people Mallat has come across. He describes engaging participants in “an exploration of [the] body ... asking them how they see their own body in relation to nature.”
Ramzi Mallat studied Fine Arts at Lancaster University in the U.K. His exhibitions include a solo-show at the UNESCO Palace in April 2017, as well as two other group shows in the United Kingdom.
Mallat’s “Charites” is a series of tree-mannequin sculptures – fig and loquat trees in flirtatious poses, one of which was also shown in Mallat’s previous exhibition, “Roots.”
Mallat tries to create some very unsettling yet meditative contexts where, he says, both the performer and the perspective audience are able to become hyper-aware of their entire surroundings.
In his video “Moyogi,” Mallat claims he attempted to “ruin a person’s psychology” and make them reach their most vulnerable state – their breaking point.
Inspired by the work of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, Mallat collaborated with Swiss artist Sara Koller in “Gestalt” to explore how far one can stretch and manipulate the participant’s personhood. Mallat describes how, during production, he pushed his participants to reach raw emotion and primitiveness through psychotherapy.
He wanted them to “imagine [themselves] as a completely different person, completely removed from everything [they’ve] ever known ... [becoming] a mechanical being, stopping thinking and seeing what’s happening around [them].”
“It’s phenomenology,” he declares, “It’s about no longer having any thoughts, concepts, any kind of relationship to anything. It’s kind of just [the performer] in the moment ... removed from everything that makes a human, human and then placed in a neutral space [that] gives a hint of nature.”