(MENAFN– Al Bayan)
Lebanese painter Ali Shams El-Din simulates the crises of collapse, homelessness and displacement with the talking brush, and launches what he calls a “color revolution” on all the devastation facing his country in an art exhibition which opened on Thursday evening in Hamra Street in Beirut and will continue until January 3rd.
Lebanon has seen a steep economic decline, which has entered its fourth year, causing the currency to lose more than 95% of its value and pushing eight out of 10 Lebanese into poverty, according to United Nations estimates. Shams El-Din has collected the disappointments of previous years and brought them aboard plastic paintings that reflect the rejection of reality, form his alternative world and express the years of rupture.
Shams El-Din’s paintings simulate the tragedy of forced migration and the loss of places where people used to live, and “their life depends on a tent, a pill or a sack of flour,” as the painter told Reuters Lebanese.
The paintings in the exhibition had the title “No Place and Lost Time,” which Shams El-Din explained, saying, “Today’s reality is a creation of yesterday, and both are open to the unknown.”
Dishes
A flyer distributed about the exhibition stated that Shams El-Din “began work on his paintings with the onset of the Arab Spring and the violence and blood that accompanied it, passing through the economic and social collapse in Lebanon which forced families and individuals displaced to four corners of the earth, leading to the explosion of the port of Beirut on the fateful August 4, which destroyed half of the city and drowned it in darkness and dust.
An explosion of chemicals that had been stored in Beirut’s port for more than seven years killed at least 215 people in 2020 and caused widespread destruction in the city. In a place reminiscent of the abandoned houses of the famous Hamra Street, which was a hotbed of intellectuals in its cafés, Shams El-Din exhibits his paintings on the walls of (Dar Al-Musawwar), whose rooms house dozens of old cameras hung on the walls like abstract paintings aged over time.
engineering
And on the stairs of (Dar Al-Musawwar), which preserves an architecture that has not been distorted by the bulldozers of architectural civilization, visitors are given old Egyptian and Arab movie posters that take them to the cinema of the last century.
Next to each painting, Shams al-Din wanted to write meaningful sentences such as (before the departure begins), (waiting for Godot), (what do we have left?) and (what will we plant when we return?).
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