November 02, 2010
Upcoming exhibition: The Yellow House, Beirut 1924 – 2010
Total Art at the courtyard & Janet Rady Fine Art
Present
The Yellow House, Beirut 1924 – 2010
Photography exhibition by Nilu Izadi
The yellow house has seen Beirut through her grandest and bloodiest turns.
Commissioned in 1924 by the Barakat family, the building, designed by Youssef Aftimos in the picturesque French Mandate style, is a work of genius, affording a view onto the street from every room - through widows, verandahs, doorways into windows beyond and onto the city.
At the time of its construction, the building was situated on the outskirts of Beirut, with urban planning the city soon built up. By the time the war started in 1982, the yellow house found itself positioned exactly on the demarcation line, which divided East and West. Due to its strategic positioning, facing their enemy to the West, the Christian militia reappropriated the interior spaces and views through to build bunkers and snipers nests.
Representing a valuable step in Beirut’s architectural heritage, this building took on a very different value during the war. The worlds of the architect and sniper were inter-twined, the latter taking the building’s exceptional layered vistas as a source for voyeur-ism, protection and mass murder. The gunmen could nest in the bunker’s dark recesses while commanding the street corner from virtual obscurity. The remaining scars of war left by the billions of bullet marks on the walls are a chilling reminder of the terror of con-flict. Using one of the bullet holes, which had pierced the stone walls, I converted one of the rooms of the yellow house into a camera obscura installation bringing the projections of the front line back into the heart of the sniper’s nest. The same aperture, which was caused as a result of war, is now turning back on itself. Projections of people walk across the mass bullet ridden walls, clouds move silently over the rubble and devasta-tion left by war, images are turned back onto themselves, the outside now looking in.
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