Coming Out in Beirut. Canceled
FALL 2023 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
November 1, 2023—January 24, 2024
The artworks featured in this exhibition come out from remote galleries storage locations and collector’s closets to shed light on specific aspects of contemporary artistic and collecting practices.
Once a work of art is produced and/or sold, it typically finds its place in one of two types of spaces: the space of display (galleries, museums, the walls of the collector’s home), or the space of storage. Like exhibition locations, the space for storing collected art is not all made equal. Collectors often preserve their collectibles in various types of storage, depending on the artifacts. There is primary storage, which is typically located either adjacent to or beneath the main display area (such as in the museum basement) or within the closets of a private collector's house. As a rule, primary storage is dedicated to preserving the most valuable artifacts under strict protection and continuous climate surveillance. Often, there are secondary and sometimes even tertiary storage facilities where institutions or private collectors amass, or dispose of specific categories of artifacts. These artifacts are often marginalized, and there are various reasons they end up in remote storage facilities. The works might be considered less valuable, or by less-important artists, or perhaps they bear the signatures of well-known artists but were made during a less significant, or very early phase in his or her artistic careers. Another possibility is that the collector or gallerist stopped representing a particular artist, relocating the works from the walls to a remote storage. Yet another widely recognized reason for works to be kept in a collector’s closet or remote locations is that they are the product of some categorical confusion, hanging in between aesthetic, artistic, political categories, such as 'decorative' vs. 'fine arts,' 'religious' vs. 'secular,' 'lower' vs. 'higher taste,' were made 'before,' or 'after' the 'right' moment of history, and so forth. Due to various factors, including aesthetic, artistic, political, and historical considerations, these objects often struggle to capture the attention and sympathy of audiences, markets, state ideologies, or academics. Consequently, this lack of attention has significant repercussions on their overall well-being. They frequently face discrimination in terms of quality conservation and care, including aspects such as temperature, humidity, air quality, pests, handling, and documentation control—a deficiency in care unknown to ‘recognized’ artifacts
Coming out in Beirut puts on display artifacts gathered from institutions and collectors’ closets and secondary storage facilities across the city of Beirut. In this coming-out exhibition we raise questions that pertain to the constitution of artistic value, the issue of artistic recognition, and the nature of aesthetic and artistic marginalization by the mainstream normative and all powerful forces of the art and academic market. These closeted artworks come forward from their dark repositories to tell us about pressing issues in the open—issues that concern normative mechanisms of artistic legitimation, binary categories and settings, art in the service of ideology, and market-driven curatorial and collection practices.
Octavian Esanu
Special thanks to Saleh Barakat.
PS: We canceled the opening and stopped installation of this exhibition in light of current tragic events, and in solidarity with other cultural institutions. The canceled exhibition remains open to the public.
