Resembling Resilience
Jacquard Woven blankets
Tracy Chahwan, 2023
Commissioned within the framework of the collective exhibition ‘Do Arabs Dream of Electric Sheep?’, at ICD Brookfield in Dubai.
In Lebanon, the clichés outnumber the people. The Paris of the Middle East, the fusion of East and West, the resilience of the population, turning tragedy into invention. The amazing nightlife, the beautiful women, the culturally innovative art, the food, and so on. Of the many threats facing Lebanon, one of the most insidious is the constant danger of an entire country being replaced by an image of that country.
In this project, we are gifted hand-woven blankets from a future in which the aesthetic replacement project is complete. All that's left are the images, memorialized here in traditionalist handcrafted form. We see cyborgs of femininity, tirelessly repeating and perpetuating their own objectification for the outsider's eye. We see parties, political rallies, prayers, dreams, repeating and perpetuating ad infinitum into a futureless tomorrow. Cultural innovations are limited to the simulacra for the diaspora to lean on, small theme parks we build inside our own homes, miniature factories where we can reproduce our memories of things that never happened. Gods and saints are now edible.
There is no world outside of this loop, this nourishing cavalcade of image on top of image. Even cataclysm cannot set us free: death and tragedy having been absorbed fully into the mythic cycles of this place, where we must always rise again from the ashes to eat and drink and build and inspire and perform. Death brings us deeper into the simulation: a news cycle with videos played and replayed, reversed and slowed down, clicked and shared, looping and reflecting. The bliss when they are finally drained of meaning. Only images left, in their sublime, accelerating vibrance.
