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Lore D Selys with Jamaal al Malaak

During her residency at WIELS, Lore D Selys started working remotely with the entity Jamaal Al Malaak (JLM), which is the (translated) nickname of a building in East Beirut, Lebanon, and at the same time an ambiguous collective. JLM diffracts, documents, rehearses and composes geohistorical and virtual relations in direct correspondence with the material and social architextures of site-specific spaces.

Angel Beauty X Garden of Olives

From Jamaal al Malaak’s infrastructural and sociopolitical gut, Lore D Selys is working within the transformation and renovations of the Affiliate’s project space to visually and lexically bleed elements of coincidence or resemblance in simultaneity or history between both localities.

Throughout the four weeks of exhibition, the installation will host, through invited guests, different types of alterations and activations to its content and surfaces. The installation in its morphing phases will be used as a rehearsal, studio and study room for the later stages of the project, including a lecture-performance that will take place at WIELS’ Auditorium later this year. All the steps, phases and processes of this project are both generative and residual of each other.

The installation will keep on being activated through renewed gestures, screenings, performances, workshops and conversations with invited guests, amongst whom Fares Chalabi, Carina Erdmann, Mlondi Dubazane, Anna Lugmeier, and Nadim Choufi.

Saturday 02.03.23 / 19:00
ABXOG - Rehearsal Room

A storage device containing
non volatile flash
memory
An electronic music instrument that generates audio signals
A word used to describe a thing in a branch of study
and the edge of something on which it rests.

Improvisation with Mlondiwethu Dubazane and Anna Lugmeier

Sunday 25.02.2024 / 18h 

Screenings & Conversation with Nadim Choufi 

The Sky Oscillates Between Eternity and Its Immediate Consequences (2021)- 18 minutes.

Two protagonists express their desires and the limitations of pursuing them as they live in a vision of a perfect city. From never-ending days that cannot afford them the privacy of the night, to secretly preserving inefficient plants or learning of new shadows of their lovers under different suns, their stories narrate how the control, isolation, and exploitation of time including seasons and organisms’ lifetimes form the blueprint to achieve such flawless futures.

I'm not sure it's the same sun anymore (2022) 3 minutes.

Months after the port explosion, I could recognize Beirut, where I live, but nothing was familiar. One day, I saw two suns in the reflection of the city.

Jamaal Al Malaak is a building-entity-database revolving around questions of locality and virtuality, collective story-telling, infra and para space-making, taking as a point of departure and prototype a modernist building in Mar Mikhael, Beirut. In 2022, a series of workshops and micro-commissions led by Aya Abdallah and Lore D Selys were conducted online and onsite with a multi disciplinary group of participants and collaborators.

Friday 16.02.2024 / 18h 

Talk & Conversation with Fares Chalabi 

Sectarian Image : The Idiots

The talk will attempt to conceptualize self-organized groups when I used to live in the Beauty-Angel building. This will touch on the specificity of such artist organizations in Lebanon in contrast with State funded art, NGOs, or isolated artists and thinkers. The talk will touch on some concepts pertaining to the artistic practices in post-war Lebanon as they circulated during the decade 2010-2020. 

BIOGRAPHIES

Chalabi studied philosophy and architecture at the Lebanese University (UL) and Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA). He obtained his Phd in philosophy at Paris 8 in 2017. Chalabi taught philosophy and art theory at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Saint Joseph University (USJ), and the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. His main fields of interest are the study of ontological argumentation, ethics and aesthetics – in line with the Deleuzian approach. Today he lives and teaches in Paris.

Nadim Choufi is a visual artist living in Beirut. He primarily focuses on the material histories and futures of innovation and desire, their social and political driving forces, and the visual and literary practices that surround them.

Working under different spells, spellings, praxis and formations, Lore D Selys is an artist and researcher working with words, lenses, multi-functions of spaces, their users and inhabitants. Since 2020, she teaches a seminar for MA students on language and collaborative practices at the Royal Art Academy in Brussels.

Mlondiwethu Dubazane is a South African creative sound-maker, spontaneous spirit music practitioner and performer. Recently, mlondiwethu has shared a new piece of music titled for what occurs at the depth of experience and can be listened to on all streaming platforms. 

Anna Lugmeier combines scenography and audio-visual strategies of femme storytelling to enable an interdisciplinary engagement with the extended spheres of narratives. In addition to her independent work as a video artist and editor, she mostly works in collaborative settings.

Many thanks to Eva Gorsse, Leia Walz, Gaspard Catteau, Fredji Hayebin, Rémi, WIELS TEAM, Alexandre Valet, Monsieur Fabit, El Chab Family, Sophie Rocca, Anna Lugmeier, Dimitri Reist, Margaux Schwarz, Axelle Stiefl, Nelson Beer, James Goodwin, Noor’ Home, Luna Torres Salon de Coiffure, Sven Nelen (FOAM) Coiffure, Yona, Rose, Pat Longchamps, Henri, Lili and Taxi de Selys for their multi-layered help and support.

This project in its initial phases has been supported by Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles, Goethe Institut Libanon and Redeem Beirut/Berlin.