THE BUSINESS OF CULTURE
Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon at AUB Gallery, Lebanon
The American University of Beirut has been
participating actively in the Lebanese cultural scene following a donation by
Dr. Samir Saleeby of a collection comprising of paintings by artists of
different generations to the university. Dr. Saleeby had inherited his father's
collection of paintings featuring artwork by his cousin Khalil Saleeby
(1870-1928) and others such as Cesar Gemayal (1898-1958), Omar Onsi
(1901-1969), Saliba Douaihy (1912-1994), Haidar Hamaoui (b. 1937), Chucrallah
Fattouh (b. 1956), and Robert Khoury (b. 1923).
Dr Saleeby, who considers this body of work to be a
part of Lebanese heritage, was not interested in selling the collection, but
rather insisted on donating it to an institution that would offer it a public
display. In 1990, he was contacted by AUB, and a few years later, a deal was
reached where the university would turn an entire floor in Post Hall into an
art museum and inaugurated another gallery outside the AUB grounds. In June
2012, the paintings were on display in an off-campus gallery on Sidani Street,
with free open access to the public.
Octavian Esanu, artist, curator and founding director
of the Soros Center for Contemprary Art in Chisinau, Moldova, was appointed to
curate the university's art programming, which presents modern and contemporary
art exhibitions in two newly inaugurated galleries.
The first exhibit, Khalil Saleeby (1870 - 1928),
presented works by Khalil Saleeby and opened in the summer of 2012 at the AUB
art gallery in Sidani Street. The second exhibition, Profiles: Collecting
Art in Lebanon (from 5 April to 24 August 2013) examines practices of art
collection and art patronage in Lebanon today, running in parallel with another
exhibition Art In Labor Skill/ Deskilling / Reskilling (until 27 July
2013) at the AUB Byblos Bank Gallery, ADA Dodge Hall, AUB Campus.
Profiles:
Collecting Art in Lebanon starts with eight screens, each displaying a
video interview with a different Lebanese art collector. The collectors come
from different social and economic backgrounds and employ varying approaches
when it comes to building their collections. In the gallery's lower level, the
setting resembles the home of an art collector; inspired by the house of Samir
Saleeby and exhibiting part of his collection in addition to works from Saleh
Barakat's collection, which showcases classical, modern and contemporary
Lebanese art.
On the top floor of the gallery, Tony
Salame, the chairman and CEO of Tony Salame group, and CEO of Aishti, a Lebanese
high-end clothing retail company, talks on screen about a collection he started
in 1989. Then, then he talks about the subsequent establishment of the Aishti
Foundation, dedicated to forming a body of international artwork in Lebanon,
and has recently been investing in Lebanese work. On another screen, Ramzi
Saidi and Afaf Osseiran Saidi discuss their journey collecting Lebanese art,
which started in the early 1980's with a concern for preserving local art
heritage. Today, they lend pieces from their collection to various cultural
events.
The exhibition also showcases collectors who have inherited their collections
[1], like George Corm who inherited his grandfather Daoud Corm's paintings
and Anachar Basbous, whose sculpture collection is displayed in an open-air
park in Rachana. Basbous inherited her father Michel Basbous's drawings and
sculptures. Another collector depicted on a screen in this exhibition was the
banker, Raymond Audi, who has been collecting artworks since the 1980s. Today,
the Bank Audi collection of modern and contemporary art is regarded as the
largest in Lebanon.
A screen is also dedicated to the gallery collector,
Saleh Barakat, who launched Agial art gallery on Abdul Aziz Street in Hamra in
1990, which prides itself on a comprehensive inventory of modern and
contemporary Arab art. Meanwhile, another monitor is assigned to the ministry
of culture, as yet another type of institutional collector, featuring Dima
Raad, the head of the ministry's department of exhibitions, talking about its
attempts to acquire works by Lebanese artists in order to create a body of
local work that would be exhibited in a museum for Lebanese arts in the future.
Amidst all these interviews, two screens are dedicated to an intellectual
discourse on art patronage, one featuring art critic and publisher Cesar
Nammour, offering an insight on the practice of acquiring work, and the other
featuring Zeina Arida Director of the Arab Image Foundation, speaking about how
collecting can be utilised as an artistic strategy. This could be the first
time in Lebanon that the notion of 'collecting' is discussed publicly. As
the politics of the Lebanese art market is usually kept hidden, the exhibition
observes the main buyers of art in Beirut; somehow the active catalysts and
safeguards of the continuity of local art production.
Yet, having relayed
generous information regarding the art market, the exhibition remains limited
to profiling the said art collectors and showcasing how private collectors are
filling the gaps of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture in investing in local arts
scene. Even as Dima Raad explains, the plans of the Ministry to involve itself
actively in local art investments remain somehow too far-fetched, since the
Ministry is already having a hard time preserving more traditional facets of
local cultural heritage.
The art market and its clandestine mechanics were
not revealed or discussed in Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon,
knowing that the drastic increase of art galleries in Beirut in the past few
years is a clear indicator of an upsurge of collectors who seem to have
realized that Lebanese art is now in the international art market, and
therefore worth the investment. Collectors who have been buying contemporary
Lebanese art since the 1990s for mere hundreds of dollars, for example, are now
owners of works worth thousands, and the respective artists represented in
their collections have gained international repute with participation in
prestigious gallery and museum shows worldwide like Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari,
Rabih Mroué, Ayman Baalbaki and others.
With that in mind, it is noteworthy to ask whether
Lebanese art collectors are really interested in filling the gaps in the
country's artistic scene left by the Ministry of Culture, or if this question
was one the exhibition decided not to tackle. What remains worth exploring is
the influence of these collectors on the quality, form and content of art
production and the artists they buy from.
