Ginane Makki-Bacho: Un art en perpétuel devenir

La guerre du Liban a marqué l'art de Ginane Makki-Bacho. A travers l'ensemble des œuvres exposées au CCF on constate que cette artiste plasticienne a subi, au long de son cheminement, à la fois, l'influence de l'expressionnisme et celle du fauvisme.

Dynamisme des formes

De cette dualité Ginane Makki-Bacho a fait un art stable.
Sa particularité est d'avoir trouvé l'unité de ces apparentes contradictions et de s'être crée un langage propre sans affectation. Elle saisit analytiquement la construction des êtres, le dynamisme des volumes et des formes, la plasticité des mouvements. Elle réalise une synthèse entre la rigueur et la sensibilité et pousse assez loin l'objet de sa recherche.

Sa vision de la réalité, son horreur de cette guerre qui déchire le pays, lui permettent d'isoler quelques éléments essentiels, un ou plusieurs personnages, un lieu, un espace librement rendus par des arabesques d'une grande souplesse. Elle réussit des compositions bien construites, aux couleurs contrastées, dégageant une saveur particulière.

La peinture de Ginane Makki-Bacho, mobile et vibrante, pénètre la composition sans hésitation, sur la trame d'un schéma graphique précis. Cette artiste entend dépasser le réalisme et aller au-delà de la "petite sensation" des données immédiates des sens. Aussi, son style se caractérise par un graphisme aigu, une écriture nerveuse qui sont le fait d'une maitrise assez élaborée du métier, où un mélange particulier de spontanéité et d'expression fait l'intérêt de l'œuvre.

Force de l'expression

Dans ses sculptures Ginane Makki-Bacho paye sa contribution à l'art moderne en adoptant des canons arbitraires. Elles utilise le métal, les obus et éclats d'obus, inflige aux formes des distorsions, des contrastes, des ruptures d'axes qui constituent son expressionisme.

Pour le devenir d'une forme son attention se concentre sur un détail qui représente le point de départ et d'appui de l'œuvre et à partir de là, tout se construit, la naissance et le jeu des plans, l'approfondissement des signes et des détails.

Elle s'efforce de donner à sa sculpture une puissance qui tient à la réalisation même de l'œuvre, mais qui est en même temps fonction du thème représenté, qui est recomposé au-delà de toute logique. Elle trouve des formes nouvelles fondées sur une vision très personnelle de la réalité sensible.

Le talent certain avec lequel cette artiste poursuit ses recherches dans les domaines de la peinture, de la sculpture et des techniques d'impression, montre que sa production ne s'épuise pas dans une imagerie commune, mais continue de sonder un art en perpétuel devenir.

Nicole Malhamé Harfouche

Beyond Disbelief: Isis and the Politics of Recognition

Amid the outrage and disbelief, excessive subjective violence appears again as a perversion, a symptom of a larger malaise plaguing the neoliberal capitalist order. The modern-day radicalization of capitalism created in and of itself movements that believe are at the heart of neoliberal reform, while they are in fact part and parcel of that same system they claim to be so distant from. Understanding that the infinite possibilities that ISIS represents are but mere expressions of the impossibilities of the historic present we live in entails the counter-intuitive exercise of distancing oneself from the totalizing ideals of the post-1990 humanitarian discourse that begs immediacy in outrage and action. This intellectual exercise in discipline surely necessitates moving away from normative understandings of modern-day violence as nothing but a vengeful response to Western interventionism or as sublimated expressions of desire for an impossible West. The intuitive need to look beyond what is (re)presented at the surface and urgency to qualify generically acts of subject violence as cultural identitarian clashes of civilisation demonstrate our role in reproducing a status quo that prevents us from thinking what still remains in the realm of the intelligible. Thereof, a formal reading - one carried out away from aberrational speech - might tell us a lot more about what invigorates ISIS than would an engagement for depth in content in an effort to unveil what is (mis)represented at the surface.

Formally, ISIS poses itself as a utopian presence set outside reality where individuals are redeemed. Indeed, the organisation successfully set up a market domain where a universal relatable ideal type of victim is circulated, one whose body has been subjugated by a hypocrite, racist and capitalist West. In this constructed space, belongingness is solicited using sentimentality which binds together the various experiences of the ISIS audience as one that is emotionally spanning and generalizable to each individual case. Thereby, ISIS flourishes by circulating a sense of emotional continuity among those who listen attentively and those who look away horrified but lend a curious ear. The generic but unique struggle of each becomes identifiable to that of others in what appears as an intricately woven "intimate public space." Solidarity is thus implied, human suffering, universalized, and by employing compassionate neo-liberalism ISIS gives birth to a "sentimental subject". One who is intimately connected to others who, like him, believe that the world is out of joint. This underlying understanding of the world homogenizes the ISIS recruits without them necessarily having the same view of the reasons why or solutions how their place in this world can be redeemed. "Sentimental intervention" mobilises the "sentimental subject" in the "intimate public sphere" whereby a fantastical scenario founded on collective desire and recognition is put forth; one, that withstands the identitarian struggle. Sentimentality in this instance centres on the imaginary of the good life, one that ISIS' media apparatuses generate. At the same time, ISIS cultivates these fantasies of belonging in the form of relief from what is experienced in the lived real. The "intimate public space" offers those who feel unseen in the modern-day normative space an opportunity to be recognized and understood. It follows that this fantasy of generating meaning aims at producing a sense of okayness, or a sense of belonging to the world. This, in turn, magnetises many different profiles of people in a type of "mass- mediated identity" by drawing on suffering and victimhood.
Indeed, in our present moment, conceivable global figures exist only in their capacity as victims. As such, ISIS' proselytism centres on identification: recruits convert to Islam because they identify with the suffering body of the Muslim victim. This universalization of the Muslim victim mirrors each self-perceived victim's grievances to them. This posits that humanity is a single entity existing in a form of global consciousness that ISIS and its likes can simply tap into by using carefully formulated narratives characterised by themes of simultaneous identification and relief from dispossession. This false-universalism which casts the Muslim community as a universal victim appeals by its non-ideological challenge to Western ideals; it simply appears to act as a moral rectifier of non-ideological conversion to moral righteousness is at the very heart of ideology itself. The cultural circulation propagated by ISIS focuses less on Islamic scripture than on victimisation, victimhood and empathy. This type of conversion to Islam remains therefore in the realm of potentiality; it is not a total conversion per se, but acts more as a conversion to humanity. The language of identification deployed is thus as much secular as it is religious.

ISIS' obsession with documentation, visibility and especially with transparency is analogous with its condemnation of a hypocrite West that, it states, dichotomizes morality between good virtuous compassion (ism) and bad brutal barbarism. Not foreign to ISIS' understanding of the ratification of equality in humanity is the notion of othering death in equivalence. If in the lived real equality between men is not within the realm of possibility, then ISIS insists on equality in death. Equivalence as such becomes the core of humanity, one that is expressed in a lived intimacy between the perpetrator and his victim who die alongside each other, whose bloods become indistinguishable in a perverse expression of their being necessary others. As such, ISIS' existence is the ultimate fantasy for the righteous, angry disenfranchised body that feels has been left out or has suffered the visible exploitation and racism of the neoliberal capitalist state. Where desire becomes law, nostalgia and romance become the narrative.

In their acts of subjective violence, ISIS recruits find (false) release. Indeed, their iconoclasm is but a form of the killing of the self. Indeed, while destroying the other, or the image of the other, the ISIS militant is engaging in repetitive hara-kiri, a ritualistic disembowelment, a sort of cleansing of the self with each strike. In that sense, all necessary others become essentially "simulacra". An unleashing or subjective expression of the impossibility of being in the present moment takes place in the form of (false) release, a desperate attempt at relief from the internal struggle and pain universalized as such under the banner of victimhood. As such, the anxieties of the historic present are perversely represented in ISIS.

ISIS represents the endgame of neo-liberal capitalism which aims to control and dominate. Indeed, the ISIS by produced subject is the mimetic other of the moral neo-liberal subject that exists under the neo-liberal capitalist state. Indeed, the ISIS subject simultaneously cares about and cares for others whose pain is reciprocal and who exist in the "intimate public sphere. "Thereby, sentiments are mobilised as a productive force under ISIS.

What this means is that examining phenomena such as ISIS entails a labour of consciousness rather than one of dejection which leaves us speechless and shocked. By mystifying ISIS we are furthering a search for a 'depth' in meaning in an attempt to unpack 'monstrosity' instead of accepting what this phenomenon wants us to know about its own self. Thereby, to understand ISIS, an engagement in a periphrastic exercise that simply rims the organisation where they remain phantasmagorical of a medieval past is tangential. Similarly, actively black-boxing them as the mere product of blathering Islamic rhetoric is otiose. Instead, by acting as puritanical iconoclasts, as fantastical expressions of the crisis of capital, and by essentially appealing to the moral subject, ISIS inherently represents modern-day consumer-oriented philosophies using visible subjectivization instead of the usual systematic one that we experience in the lived real.

Yara M. Damaj

Ginane Makki Bacho: The scrap Metal Collector

Civilisation covers four decades of Ginane Makki-Bacho's sculpture, the latest of which, also entitled Civilisation 2012-2016, recollects past techniques and yet goes a step further: fragments of metal are meticulously selected, assembled, and welded to create realistic forms. The installation produces an oppressive landscape that underlines the most invasive detritus of civilisation: violence.

Ginane Makki Bacho's welding work dates from 1983 when 'shrapnel and shells invited themselves into her home during the 1982 Israeli invasion'. In 1983 Bacho started transforming metal scraps she had amassed by assembling and welding them. An avid collector, she began to accumulate metal detritus - an inescapable waste of civilisation - out of a fascination with ''its hardness and subtle colouring''.

In the 1990s, she produced, from shrapnel and larger fragments of shells, her Cedar Trees series. The cedar tree is both a symbol of nationalism and the emblem represented on the Lebanese flag, serving as a reminder of a violent past in Ginane's sculptures. Her last body of work, produced between 2012-2016, makes visible the inconsistent landscape of civilisation. Her new forms shift the original function of the pieces and generate new meanings.

In 2006, Bacho gathered leftovers from the Israeli 33 Days of War on Lebanon. She clarifies that these ''shrapnel and shells differ from the 1982 war; they have a silver colour, and are hard to work with as they disintegrate just as you touch them''. Bourj el Murr series, 2012, exemplifies other ways of' modelling' metal. What started as an experiment in piercing holes in sheets of metal ends up being a rough textured cuboid that recalls a landmark building in Beirut: the unfinished and derelict Bourj el-Murr. The series obsessively repeats the haunting figure of the Murr building, standing today, at what used to be the Green Line (the dividing line between what used to be East and West Beirut).

In her latest work, Ginane Makki bacho resorts to figuration. She gives her sculptures realistic and violent forms that betray distressing realities. She makes the unbearable visible, inviting the viewer to reflect on brutality. Obsessive repetitions of emblematic figures become a means, for both the artist and the viewer, to deal with the traumatic real.

Zena Meskaoui