Emerging Voices: A Dialogue With Niemeyer (EXHIBITION)

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Photo Credits by Cliff Makhoul

Exhibition Poster (Designed by Rana BaBa)

“Emerging Voices: A Dialogue with Niemeyer” explores the intricate relationship between the inner and outer space of Tripoli International Fair as expressed through the vision of a graphic designer. This interactive exhibition invites viewers to participate in a conversation that explores the experience of Oscar Niemeyer’s dome as an interior of memory during and after the Lebanese Civil War. With nuanced shifting of light and space both physical and emotive, the discourse comes to life through three triangulated lampshades that layer presence and absence, memory and reality, oscillating between what’s visible and invisible.

The emerging voices is a moment suspended in time, same as Niemeyer’s project in Tripoli, across different generations who had an encounter with this place, a coming together of Niemeyer, the city of Tripoli and its people. Through traces (Graffiti, throw-ups, tags) hidden within the interiors of the fair, especially the dome, they engage in a quest that derive from what was before a locus for war and torture.

The exhibition compromises three triangles each with diffusive light on the inside framed by series of photographs on the outside. We move from darkness to light and experience the conversation between the inside and outside of the dome. It is the light that guide the participants, virtually, inwards, and when light shifts so do the clashing layers of time hidden beneath cultural, political, and social meaning. This process redefines the inside and outside layer by layer, image by image, trace by trace. I used the lens of the camera to deconstruct the dome into moments of in and out and recreated it in a photographic composition that will become later the essence of this discourse.

The installation is inspired by the strokes of the left traces (graffiti, throw-ups, tags) and projected into the experimented space. Following the photographs forming the inner and outer space of the dome. Each created triangle lamp is opaque from within allowing a collective narrative of events, movements, and displacement. An intersection resulted from a muted layering of photograph, traces, and light.