Now Here Then Elsewhere Exhibition at Beirut Art Center

The Beirut Art Center is hosting a solo exhibition called “Now Here Then Elsewhere” by Eric Baudelaire.

Now Here Then Elsewhere is a multimedia exhibition of films, photographs and works on paper that revolves around the post-68 era of radicalism and the presence of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon. The lives of Fusako Shigenobu, the founder and former leader of the JRA, May Shigenobu, Fusako’s daughter with a Palestinian guerilla fighter, and Masao Adachi, a Japanese screenwriter/director and former member of the JRA are at the heart of Eric Baudelaire’s exhibition.

“The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years Without Images”, Baudelaire’s 66 minute-long film, will be shown for the first time in Lebanon. The work traces the itineraries of its three protagonists on a personal and political level, framing their journeys as an anabasis, at once a wandering into the unknown, and a return to the self. Voice-overs of May Shigenobu and Masao Adachi overlay super 8 images of contemporary Beirut and Tokyo. The exhibition also features various documents, family photographs of Fusako Shigenobu, silkscreen posters, a libretto and drawings produced by Adachi while in prison. Together with the film, the materials explore Baudelaire’s interest in the possibilities of fiction and subjectivity that can be extracted from documentary forms.