‘This is not resilience’: Gallerist Joumana Asseily on life after the Beirut blast

Marfa’ Projects’ founder Joumana Asseily is often asked when she will leave her native Lebanon. Since the October Revolution in 2019, the country’s seemingly never-ending crisis is worsening: the poverty rate now exceeds 50 percent and the Lebanese pound continues to plummet. The question has been asked even more frequently since August 4, 2020, when an explosion in which 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate improperly stored in the city’s port detonated. The blast, felt in neighboring countries, killed more than 200, injured over 7,500, left approximately 300,000 homeless, and caused a reported $15 billion in property damage.

But Asseily is going nowhere – and the pandemic has only strengthened her resolve. Her six-year-old gallery is located within the port neighborhood – marfa’ means port in Arabic – and occupies two garages a mere 400 meters away from the site of the explosion. ‘COVID saved us,’ says Asseily, who would have been at the gallery in the early evening, likely listening to jazz with her colleagues, had a lockdown not been imposed that week. She saw the blast from her home in Yarzeh, a village 10 kilometers above Beirut and 20 minutes by car to the capital. ‘I lived the wars in Lebanon, but never heard or saw anything like that bomb,’ she says. The very next day, and for a month thereafter, Asseily cleaned out Marfa’. ‘I knew I was going to rebuild it,’ she says. ‘This is not resilience. It’s that we want to continue.’ 

Marfa’ reopened with a group show, ‘Water’, in May 2021. Among the works exhibited is Vartan Avakian’s seven-minute video Short Wave Long Wave (2010), occupying one of the gallery’s garages. Both the Lebanese-Armenian artist’s piece and its location made auspicious statements. First, it was Avakian who advised Asseily ahead of Marfa’s 2015 launch to procure both spaces for the gallery. Second, the artist’s film presents a sepia-stained distant vista of what he imagines to be America, which appears inaccessible or aspirational, but is in fact the Beirut harbor. Short Wave Long Wave evokes the volatility of what lies behind what is perceivable, the borderline separating reality from what is imagined. ‘Behind the sea,’ the artist states, ‘[…] stood a city with a high skyline and big structures. […] it looked like New York in American films and TV series.’ Throughout the film’s length, his imagination gradually recedes to give way to reality: an ostensibly calm city.

Asseily first came across Avakian’s work at the 2013 edition of Art Dubai, where he won the now-defunct Abraaj Group Art Prize alongside four other artists with A Very Short History of Tall Men (2012). Comprising several small gold figurines depicting leaders of failed coups d’état, the work is a sarcastic commentary on the hubris of power-hungry men and the ephemeral mark they have left on history. Asseily then visited Avakian in his Beirut studio and was magnetized by his approach to art-making, which she felt was ‘profoundly poetic and rooted in science and engineering.’ He told her about a project he had been working on, which features a collection of photographs as well as crystals gathered from the dust of the Barakat building, a historic Beirut landmark. Intrigued, Asseily asked him to inaugurate Marfa’ with it. ‘I feel like we built the space together,’ says Avakian, ‘and we’re still doing this together.’ 

In October 2015, Marfa’ opened with Avakian’s solo show ‘Collapsing Clouds of Gas and Dust’. The project addressed two central elements in Avakian’s childhood: his life in the Unesco World Heritage Site of Byblos (‘my playground was an archaeological field’) and an aggressive asthmatic allergy caused by dust that developed during adolescence. ‘Dust is not a material, it’s a state of things,’ says Avakian. ‘It contains naturally occurring elements like human and animal remains, cosmic dust, pollen, fabric remnants, and so on.’ His fascination with what is unseen but exists and can be deciphered came to form the backbone of his practice. ‘Art should continuously try to signify what is not signifiable,’ says Avakian. ‘I try to create moments of imagination.’

The artist constructs such moments in A Sign For Things to Come, his installation for Art Basel Statements in September, marking Marfa’s sophomore participation at the fair. He came to Basel with Asseily when Marfa’ participated in Liste Art Fair in 2018 and installed his work over two days. It helps that Avakian studied cinema and architecture at university and has a background in engineering, combining to make him quite the virtuoso artist. ‘He’s fun to travel with, has refined taste, and is very knowledgeable,’ says Asseily. Being brought up in an archaeological wonder seeded the belief in Avakian that everything is an artifact, a remnant; one just has to look with wonder. 

With his futuristic outlook and habitual exploration of contemporary relics, the signs literally pointed to signs: A Sign of Things to Come will feature discarded neon signs that serve as evidence of Lebanon’s economic crisis. ‘A neon sign is already a kind of fossil because it just traps neon gas in a tube,’ says Avakian. ‘Agitating the electrons makes it glow. But when it’s not agitated, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means it’s dormant. It’s another example of not seeing things that exist.’ While Avakian’s forthcoming installation at Art Baselis indeed a sign of the times, it could also be seen as a relic for future archaeologists to examine. ‘Maybe they’ll find traces of me,’ he laughs. ‘You cannot control the meaning and relevance of the things you do. And that’s what fascinates me.’

Marfa' will participate in Art Basel's Statements sector from September 24-26, 2021. See the full list of participating exhibitors here. 

Myrna Ayad is a Dubai-based editor, writer, cultural strategist, and art advisor, as well as the former director of Art Dubai (2016–18). In addition to her articles appearing in The New York Times, Vogue Arabia, and The National, she is the author of Sheikh Zayed: An Eternal Legacy and Dubai Wonder (both Assouline, 2021) and editor of Contemporary Kingdom: The Saudi Art Scene Now (Canvas Central, 2014), among other books.

Top image: Exhibition view of ‘Water’, Marfa' Projects, Beirut, May 2021. Photo by Youssef Itani.