Tamáss 1: Contemporary Arab Representations--Beirut/Lebanon

by Catherine David, Jalal Toufic (Editor), Jalal Toufic, Walid Sadek

Tamss --which means contact, touch, contiguity, adjacency, tangency and confrontation line(s)--is part of Catherine David's long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations . The project comprises seminars, performances, publications and presentations of works by different authors--visual artists, architects, writers and poets--with the aim of encouraging productions, interaction and exchange between the different cultural centers of the Arab world and the rest of the world. It aims to tackle heterogeneous situations and contexts that may sometimes be antagonistic or conflicting, and thus to acquire more specific knowledge about what is currently going on in certain parts of the Arab world, to look at the complexity of aesthetics in relation to social and political situations, and to encourage people to think more deeply about the role played today by cultural practices in our own countries. Tamss 1 is dedicated to Beirut and Lebanon, and to the development and promotion of an experimental, critical contemporary Arab culture. All those taking part in the project aim to propose representations that can broach the reality of the city and the present conditions of its society, realizing that there are no theories or forms that can encapsulate the phenomenological complexity of contemporary Beirut and Lebanon. Tamss 2 is dedicated to Cairo.

168 pages

First published December 2, 2003

Reviews

[okyrhoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is actually the catalogue of an art project, with essays on the moral, urban and architectural condition of post-civil war Lebanon. There are truths here masquerading as opinion or artistic expression that you won't see in official historical accounts, but which hold many truths nevertheless.

Selected works:
- Hostage: The Bashar Tapes by The Atlas Group, a project created by Walid Raad.
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapede...

- Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere by Saree Makdisi.
http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/i...

(Fundació Antoni Tàpies has published a new volume in the series, Contemporary Arab Representations: The Iraqi Equation).