Gallery 1

Ghost at the Feast brings together five major works conceived by Shuruq Harb over the past ten years. In her practice, Harb looks peripherally at the dispossession and oppression faced by Palestinians, tracking the kinds of dreams, hallucinations, psychological symptoms and impulses their brutality and fragmentation creates. Harb’s vastly interdisciplinary work emerges from a restless effort to create a portrait of her native Ramallah through its ephemeral inventories of ever-changing street signage, and popular imagery circulating between city facades, shop windows and virtual clouds. Faces and names of strangers, signifiers of another time and else place, other peoples’ stories and souvenirs… all have become her way of claiming her own memory and politics of location. 

In continuous correspondence and conversation with the Beirut Art Center team, Harb has proposed new and existing iterations of her works, two of which were produced in Lebanon for the show. Together we have conceived an exhibition filtered through layers of estrangement and familiarity. Exploring how the visual indexes of one place could resonate in another where neither she nor her works can travel, what emerges is an uncannily common terrain that links our two cities and their respective struggles: a profound sense of loss and a culture that comes out of and resists duress.

Among other things, the exhibition poses the question of how works made from and for Palestine can take on the ability to conjure the dead in Lebanon.

Shuruq Harb 

is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Her artistic practice focuses on online visual culture and traces subversive routes for the circulation of images and goods. 

From 11AM to 8PM, booking required
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