‘On Becoming Two’ Exhibition

Tony Chakar takes over Beirut Art Center’s ground floor, and devises his own course in the art space, playing with and against a certain architecture and a specific context, while using as a starting point his relation to his different practices: architecture, text and language. Every moment of the exhibition represents the material mutation of a specific gesture in his work, from the pages of a book growing to the size of a wall, or a map spread substituting itself to the reconstruction of an event or performative gesture. The exhibition provides the specific framework for a singular voice, one that is embodied in Beirut; a context in which post-war antagonisms and divisions have resulted in complex artistic activity, which in turn gave way to a scene dependent on the requirements and standards of the art market.
In response to this evolution, Tony Chakar develops a dialectic of presence and forgetfulness that borrows from different areas of perception, and is furthermore echoed in the title of the exhibition. On Becoming Two is a defense of dissociation, doubt and critical distance. Chakar cites the poet Hölderlin: “This conversation that we are”. Visitors will have access to a work initiated twenty years ago, wherein the examination of beliefs that constitute modernity opens a poetic space, providing in the process a live quality to the sharing of knowledge.