Re-edit “Summer 91”
(2019)
Installation, tiles, video, sound
Co- created with Nadim Tabet
La Vitrine | Beirut Art Residency
Special Thanks to architect, Ahmad Iskandari
Completely encased with swimming pool tiles, the installation projects a woman’s underwater figure onto the walls. The accompanying soundscape echoes the distant voices of children playing, overlaid with chants of the current revolution.
The title evokes the notion of “remake” in cinema and the work details out part of the original film to an obsessive level, similar to the way a painter might investigate an aspect of their work over and over again on a canvas. This moment in time and its fleeting memory is suspended against the backdrop of the country’s instability. The viewpoint is taken from inside a bubble of safety and normality, disconnected from the harsh realities that are just outside the door.
In 2014, Wehbé and Tabet co-directed the film Summer 91’, a product of their combined personal memories of adolescence in the beach resorts of Lebanon with all the nostalgia and unfledged hopes of an era. The installation continues their project, an evolution from Wehbé’s work on the mechanism on memory around the beach resorts in wartime Lebanon and Tabet’s films on youth, their relationships, and engagement with life’s challenges.
Press: L’ Orient Le Jour
