2020 has been one of those years: 12 months jam-packed with calamity, a year that keeps on giving. in lebanon 2020 has meant a continuing uprising that has swept the country, an unprecedented financial and economic collapse, floods, fires, a global pandemic, an explosion of gross negligence which took out entire neighbourhoods of beirut, and the many and far reaching consequences of all of the above, and more.

Hindsight is 20/20 as the saying goes, but the flurry of events that has taken us by storm leave little room for reflection, so we downsized expectations, and rather than look to artists for some kind of clarity and direction, we simply tried to offer them manageable platforms to maintain some semblance of a practice in relation to ongoing events.

The exhibition includes works that responded to micro-commissions 1, a reflection on the significance of hands mobilized to fight or to care for self and others, micro-commissions 2, which relied on the ability of drawing to address the current moment unburdened by the weight of representation, and micro-commissions 3, a reflection on the profound insecurity created by a regime obsessed with security and surveillance.

The exhibition also contains a dark room blaring music made in response to the section on فرد, (individual) of the derivative, 5 exquisitely detailed illustrations responding to the theme 

of صدى (reverberations), and 5 tiny watercolors in response to رقم (number).

micro-commissions n.1
myriam boulos, ghida hachicho, carla habib

micro-commissions n.2
bahij jaroudi, raphaelle macaron, tracy chahwan, mohamad kraytem, nour hifaoui fakhoury

micro-commissions n.3
danielle davie, lara tabet, malak mroueh, panos abrahamian

the derivative
فرد -rayan abdel khelek, sandy chamoun, aya atoui, renata sabella, leil zahra

صدى -sarah saroufim

رقم – hatem imam