Apr 10
Between My Eyelids: Lessons in War, Performance, and Media from 1980s Beirut
This talk is part of the Edwin L. Weisl Lectureship in the Arts with funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation.
"This talk focuses on the performance work of Lebanese artist Rabbia Sukkarieh, who in 1988, during the Civil War, worked with a television cameraman to stage an action wrapping bullet-scarred trees in a 'green line' demarcation zone. Although a few seconds of footage aired on national television, subsequent accounts of Sukkarieh’s performance have relegated the work to unillustrated speculation about lost histories. Two years ago, by chance, I encountered a digitized VHS tape of the television program and its documentation of Sukkarieh's performance. Having found this material, it would seem possible to revise histories of experimental performance and media during the war. But how, and with what ethical stakes? Sukkarieh herself anticipated the fugitivity of her resistance actions--observing in her 1989 graduation thesis that 'Third World problems sleep between my eyelids,' meaning that they accompanied her work as an unseen presence. In a world constituted by too much documentation of violence, what options do artists have for bearing witness? And how should art historians participate in this task?"
Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, where she holds a Toban Family Faculty Fellowship. She is author of the 2020 monograph Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (UC Press), and co-editor of the 2018 anthology Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents, published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.