In the blink of an eye

Beirut is a visually polluted city: over-saturated with media advertisements, on highways and street corners, meant to disturb a passerby’s horizon, from long distances as they’re driving, on sides of a highway, on both sides of a billboard sign, to invasive street corners, as they walk around the busy city walkways.

The era of billboard advertisement has also brought with it urban changes: the metal structures that support the images are brought up as easily as the images that they carry. As a medium and a structure, the billboard is ripe for intervention: a porous medium between image and audience, allowing a constant conversation between the two. Blank enough to chameleonize; they are spaces of spectatorship and viewership, unmediated, each one informed by the landscape that surrounds it, in a continuous loop of feeding an audience an image all the while being fed by the gaze of those who view it.

In the past couple of years, we’ve seen the demise of the image, iconography and representation in full juxtaposition to a failing political state. In January 2024, TAP reached out to ten visual artists to create context-responsive, socially-engaged works that occupy the space of the billboard - conceptually reflecting and subverting the commentary on the failure of its classic image: the advertisement.

Artworks by Annabel Daou, Basile Ghosn, Dalia Baassiri, Dia Mrad, Mahmoud El Safadi, Nathalie Harb, Randa Mirza, Renoz, Tamara Kalo, and Yasmina Hilal will appear across different billboards in Beirut over the summer of 2024. The artworks will be up for two weeks, living amongst other advertisement images, infiltrating the urban landscape of Beirut, completely permeable to the experience of the city and its inhabitants. In our conversations with the artists over the course of three months, we touched on aspects of immediacy, vulnerability, the use of language, borders and demarcations, the relationship to the city, the world of advertisement, notions of scale and intimacy, urban landscape, and threatened ecologies. Each work is imbued with political and social undertones, and each work is meant to be encountered: a subtle infiltration of the public spaces we inhabit, a permeation of the billboard medium as we’ve come to know it, and an occupation of an urban structure.

Read the publication here.