City Mirage

Glowing, flashing, blinking lights: A dense city’s urban landscape is often littered with signs that are designed to catch the eye of the passerby. Shops, restaurants and businesses announce their establishments with these light-filled tubes and stylized metallic and plastic boxes, as if to solidify their prowess and success through displaying them successively on the streets. With time, they create a brilliant snapshot of the cityscape that lives on in people’s minds for decades. For the last five years, the artist has been collecting shop signs and lights from places that have already shut their doors in his city, Beirut. Even though many of these stores managed to survive through the toughest moments of the civil war and up to the present (1970s-2000s), they began to close en masse after the advent of the economic crisis in Lebanon a few years ago, coupled with the Beirut port explosion in 2020. What is left of them is merely these deteriorating and broken-down signs and light boxes, dangling from the ruins of what once was. Like the remnants of an open wound, their abandonment leaves no place for closure or remembrance. These fragments of a city construct a portrait of its inevitable disappearance: a scene that is no longer present for anyone to see; an entire cityscape relegated to the realm of memory alone. In the hope of saving the ‘face’ of his disappearing city, the artist created a composition out of these signs arranged together in a nonsensical fashion, in which their non-meaning reflects the chaos of the current moment. By dismembering them from their original place within the urban fabric, he aims to rescue some part of his memory through juxtaposing them and creating a kind of topography of disappearance.