This exhibition puts on display artworks from the permanent collection of the American University of Beirut (AUB). It showcases some of its most valuable samples, arranging them in a manner that enables fragments of walls to also host artworks from other collecting institutions and individuals. We adopt the “open walls” method—commonly used in agriculture, to allow plants to extend and grow along a support structure—as the main principle of exhibition display. The Open Walls: AUB Art Collection exhibition aims to foster the cultivation of knowledge about art by filling in “gaps” and enabling a more comprehensive and flexible representation of the art historical narrative through an ever-changing open walls setup. Artworks from various collections, institutions, styles or ages are invited to be exhibited in close proximity to AUB's art collection. With this we draw attention to the imperative need for dialogue and collaboration between AUB and other local, regional, and global cultural institutions, collections, artists, and foundations on expanding knowledge about art.
EXHIBITIONS & (exhibitions-installations)
Coming out in Beirut puts on display artifacts gathered from institutions and private collectors’ closets and secondary storage facilities across the city of Beirut. With this coming-out we raise questions that shed light on specific aspects of contemporary artistic and collecting practices. 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.
PS: We canceled the opening and stopped installation of this exhibition in light of current tragic events, and in solidarity with other cultural institutions in the Middle East. The exhibition remains open to the public under the new title: Coming Out in Beirut. Canceled.
Coming Out in Beirut. Canceled
Fall 2023
AUB Art Galleries, Beirut
In the past decades, art historians and connoisseurs who sought to offer a more comprehensive account on the history of art in Lebanon, Syria, and the Levant, have called attention to a “Marine School” (also sometimes the “Maritime School” or the “School of Beirut”). The Lebanese painter Moustafa Farroukh (1901-1957) may have been responsible for launching the label when he presented the results of his research into the “precursors of Lebanese art” in a conference organized by the Cénacle Libanais on March 28, 1947. In his presentation Farroukh names Ibrahim Serbai, Dimashqiyah, Said Merhi, and Ali Jamal, all of whom – he says – “devoted their art to paint boats, natural scenes and the sea.” One may also assume that the label “Marine School” – which stuck with the later generations of art historians – took root when Farroukh states in the next paragraph that Ali Jamal, “whose passion for painting the sea and its waves and boats led him to leave for Constantinople where he joined the Naval [or Marine] School and graduated as naval officer.” Was this the beginning of the mysterious art historical category that the present project seeks to unravel?
Art Education in the Middle East: An Open Format/Work in Progress/Multi-Participant Convention of Regional Art Educators
Fall 2021-Spring 2022
AUB Art Galleries, Beirut
AUB Art Galleries announces its year-long project entitled: ART EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST. This project throws light on the nature, histories, and pedagogical models of art education encountered throughout the region. The event is conceived in terms of several plateaus, where artworks and presentations by faculty and students from different art schools or art departments, as well as material pertaining to their curricula, education, or history will be presented in an overlapping and revolving display. Some of the plateaus have been launched during the spring semester together with my students in the curatorial course AHIS 285-325.
Party in the Sky: The Photo-DJ Lucien-Samaha
SPRING 2021 (Online)
This exhibition brings to the attention of the public the activities of the Lebanese/American photographer, artist, traveler, archivist, and DJ Lucien Samaha (b. 1958). From his many long- and short-term occupations (i.e. as flight attendant, archivist and database designer/publisher of his personal lifetime collection of analog and digital photographs, nightlife paparazzo and fashion photographer) we decided to focus on one of his gigs in New York City. From the second half of the 1990s until the second week of September 2001, Samaha DJed on the top floors of one of the “Twin Towers" of the original World Trade Center (1973-2001). He was known on the upper floors of WTC's Tower One, or the North Tower, as DJ MondoLucien, and sometimes as Lucien the Loungecore DJ. His parties ran every Wednesday night at a bar called the Greatest Bar on Earth, in the restaurant complex Windows on the World located on the 107th floor.
Modernizing Collaborations in West Beirut: Farid Haddad and Jay Zerbe (1969-1970)
FALL 2020 (Online)
At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the Beirut artistic scene witnessed a series of artistic collaborations. At the heart of these exchanges were two young artists: one Lebanese and one American. The Lebanese Farid Haddad (b. 1945) graduated in 1969 from the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at the American University of Beirut and was working as a medical illustrator, while the American Jay Zerbe (b. 1949) was in 1969 in the junior year of his B.A. from the same department at AUB. In that year, and the year that followed, Haddad and Zerbe launched a series of exhibitions at AUB, as well as in various galleries outside campus.
The Naïve Arab Artist: Naïf, Outsider, and Art Brut from the Middle East
SPRING 2020 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
This exhibition is dedicated to a particular category of artists. They may not even be regarded as “real” artists—but when they are, art critics make sure to add one of the multiple qualifiers collected over the years to describe this specific group. The most commonly used descriptors for identifying these artists include: naïve, naïfs, faux-naïfs, faux-faux-naïfs, semi-naïfs, outsiders, faux-outsiders, art brut and many others. This exhibition shows about fifteen naïve and outsider artists from the Middle East, including one unknown, and many anonymous craftsmen working on vernacular Qur’ans produced in Central Asian and included in this exhibition.
Agreement and Deed
FALL 2019 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
This curatorial improvisation is the direct product of the extraordinary political events unfolding in the streets. Agreement and Deed was conceived and launched in a hurry, without much planning or ceremonial accouterment, to occupy a space opened by the Thawra [revolution].
Cut/Gash/Slash—Adachi Masao—A Militant Theory of Landscape
SPRING 2019 (The Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Beirut)
The filmmaker, screenwriter, film theorist, artist, and political activist Adachi Masao (b. 1939) is considered—along with Koji Wakamatsu and Nagisa Oshima—a leading figure in Japanese New Wave Cinema. Since the 1960s, Masao has produced many experimental films and written film scripts on a range of political topics. In the 1970s, Masao joined Nihon Sekigun, the Japanese Red Army (a communist group founded by Fusako Shigenobu in Lebanon in 1971), for the purpose of supporting the Palestinian struggle. After a trip to the Cannes Film Festival, Masao and Wakamatsu stopped in Beirut to interview and film Palestinian fighters. Masao declared himself a militant for the World Revolution and the Arab cause. He then spent 27 years in the Middle East: for the most part in the Bekaa Valley and, after the withdrawal of the Red Army from Bekaa in 1997, in Beirut.
The Permanent Collection
FALL 2018 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
Etel Adnan / John Carswell / Maryette Charlton / Saloua Raouda Choucair / Saliba Douaihy / Simone Fattal / Moustapha Farroukh / César Gemayel / Farid Haddad / Jean Kalifeh / Helen Khal / Hussein Madi / Omar Onsi / Khalil Saleeby
The first known attempts to establish a permanent art collection at AUB came in the early 1970s. Several key works, including Farid Haddad’s Untitled (1971), Helen Khal’s Jacob’s Ladder (1969), and Jean Khalifeh’s The Singing American (1971), came together in 1971 as part of an initiative to establish the “Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art of the American University of Beirut.” The mission of the project was to encourage artists and collectors to donate or loan artworks to AUB, in order to make “the experience of art a living part of the educational process.”
Face The White Cube: Interventions at the Limits of the AUB Art Galleries
SPRING 2018 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Beirut)
ANDREA COMAIR, LOUAI KAAKANI, DANIELLE KRIKORIAN, NOOR TANNIR
Face The White Cube! is the title of a series of mini-exhibitions developed by students during the course “Theories, Methods and Practices of Curating” (284B). Each mini-exhibition unfolds or intervenes within a space in some way adjacent to the AUB Art Galleries. The verb “face” was chosen to be interpreted broadly: as a critique of the ideology of the white cube (and its specific context at the AUB Galleries), or as a simple encounter and/or light curatorial exercise on the margins of these galleries. The particularities of display have been determined not only by material constraints (a shortage of dedicated white cube space at AUB) but also by a critical temptation to engage with the problematic of the white cube from within various borderline situations, thresholds and other transitory states within the “museistic” and curatorial discourse. Transitory spaces and states, however, were not chosen to be examined for their own sake (or for the sake, for example, of identitarian investments in various forms of marginality) but in order to better understand the convictions, conventions and constrictions of the notorious white cube. But in order for it to be able to provide “magical” services to a particular category of objects (turning them into art) the gallery desperately requires the support of various subsidiary spaces, forces and processes.
One Hundred Years Closer to Communism: Art and Revolution in the Middle East
FALL 2017 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
This exhibition and series of events are prompted by this year’s 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. When the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd, it sent waves of hope and fear across the entire planet. This moment of historical rupture not only determined a direction for various subsequent political struggles and movements, but had also a profound impact on cultural and artistic forms, and on the relation between radical artistic and political gesture. Even though the impact of the 1917 revolution on political and artistic life in the Middle East was not as immediate as in other regions of the world, or perceived with as much urgency, its reverberations are nevertheless discernable. The main cause proclaimed by Red October – the abolition of class exploitation and of social and national oppression – not only lay at the heart of the programs of local communist parties but it also revealed itself in the content and form of various artistic genres and media: from theater to literature, and from graphic political posters to the fine arts and cinema.
Contemporary Artistic “Revolutions”: An Institutional Perspective
FALL 2017, AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut
Over the past years art historians, critics, artists and philosophers have more frequently than ever posed the question of what is, or was, contemporary art. The question has been most urgently posed in a recent series of books by Western academic publishers, special issues of art periodicals, or conference proceedings organized by leading art institutions. This year AUB Art Galleries joins these debates and brings a different approach and perspective to the theme. First of all, we would like simultaneously to translate recent dialogues surrounding contemporary art into the format of an art exhibition, an academic conference, and a publication; secondly, we are seeking ways to emphasize the problematic of the contemporary by drawing attention to debates over “what is” or “was” contemporary art as they unfolded in “non-Western” parts of the world.
Mimesis, Expression, Construction
FALL 2016, The Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum
This exhibition uses the aesthetic categories of "mimesis," "expression" and "construction" for both expository and didactic reasons. We invite our audience to explore artworks – traditional paintings of different genres and styles, modernist compositions, objects and constructions, as well as works of contemporary art – through these major categories of modernist aesthetics.
Mashrou' Proletkult (Project Proletkult)
SUMMER 2016, AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery
Mashrou' Proletkult is an exhibition and one-day congress. The exhibition is an invitation to every artist to display his or her artwork at AUB; the Mashrou’ Proletkult All-Artist-Congress offers every artist present at this event the opportunity to deliver a speech on a relevant topic of his or her choosing.
The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener
FALL 2015, AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery and AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Beirut
Co-curated with Kirsten Scheid
The Arab Nude: The Artist as Awakener examines the way in which artists and intellectuals of the Mandate era engaging in a double struggle against imperialism, Ottoman and European, resorted to an ideal form or pictorial device to concretize their visions of Arab modernity. For them, to be “Arab” was as much a matter of ambiguity and ambition as was the quest to be an artist. In fact, both labels required leaps of imagination over local conditions and imperial plans. What claims for identity, community, and political society were invested in the divesting of Arab bodies of their clothes? Our exhibition documents the debates that met the genre of the Nude in exhibition halls and newspapers. Itsituates artistic practices in relation to ongoing, urgent discussions about the meaning of citizenship, urbanity, and internationalism carried out amid movements for women’s rights, pan-Arabism, and various nationalisms, as well as educational reform, militarization, the scouting movement and nudist colonies. Without espousing the role of awakener for artists, our subtitle foregrounds the social,political or cultural motivations for these artists to embrace and adopt the genre of the Nude in their artistic careers.
The 1990s – Jayce Salloum: كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments]
FALL 2015, AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut
Jayce Salloum’s installation كان يا ما كان There Was and There Was Not [redux/fragments] is an opportunity to take a step back and look at the 1990s. The photographs, newspaper clips, scholarly and other texts, books, postcards, Polaroid shots, and videos – which Salloum, a Canadian-born artist of Lebanese parentage, collected, made, or recorded during his time in the Middle East in the late 1980s and early 1990s – compose one large document, which we consider here as a record of the 1990s. This exhibition is a chance to revisit the early days of an art historical period which we still inhabit. The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1989) has not only been a major point of historical reference but also an art historical threshold. The end of the war marked a radical historical shift, launching not only new economic and political forces and alliances but also artistic idioms, art institutions and a number of Lebanese artists into the orbit of the global art world. The 1990s also opened up a new art historical period known as “Lebanese contemporary art.”
Al-Mussawirun: Artists before Art
SPRING 2015, AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Beirut
This exhibition recreates, or simulates – within the restricted space of the university gallery – a landscape of images, pictures, and crafted objects that one might have come across a century ago in the area that includes present-day Lebanon. We catch a glimpse of a time when the Western model of autonomous art had not yet fully emerged in the Middle East, that is to say a time when there were no contemporary art centers and private galleries, art schools and museums, biennials, prizes, prices, dealers, critics and curators. We invite our visitors to imagine a cultural period in which very diverse modes of picture- and object-making, both utilitarian and non-, cohabited the same cultural field.
Trans-Oriental Monochrome: John Carswell
November 19, 2014 - February 18, 2015 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Ada Dodge Hall, AUB and Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Sidani Street, Hamra)
This exhibition familiarizes the public with a series of monochrome works produced by John Carswell: the art historian, artist, teacher, explorer, curator and scholar of Near, Middle, and Far Eastern art and culture. Carswell graduated in 1951 from the Royal College of Art in London, and instead of setting out to conquer the British art world, ruled at the time by local social realists, he embarked on a steamboat and entered the Middle East through the port of Beirut. For almost six decades now, John Carswell has been studying this region, following on the heels of his lifelong source of inspiration, the medieval Islamic explorer Ibn Battuta. Instead of tracing the routes of the sacred Hajj, however, Carswell has been closely observing the pilgrimage of artistic ideas, the circulation of cultural currents within and beyond an area that gave the world its earliest great civilizations. His interest in the art, culture and history of the Fertile Crescent has led him to various places and positions: from archaeological excavations in Turkey, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine, to teaching fine arts at the American University of Beirut, to following in the footsteps of the first Western explorers of Central Asia, to becoming the Curator of the Oriental Institute and then Director of the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, and later moving back to London to become the Director of the Islamic and South Asian Department of Sotheby’s, London.
Video Forecast: A Selection of Video Art from Central Asia
SEPTEMBER 4 – OCTOBER 24, 2014 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
Exhibition design for exhibition curated by Stefan Rusu
Video Forecast: A Selection of Video Art from Central Asia introduces the public to contemporary artistic strategies and practices encountered today in the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. Over the past two decades these countries have been caught up in a spiral of political, social and cultural change. The transformations taking place in these five Central Asian states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – are influenced by multiple historical and political factors; their continuing negotiation of a post-Soviet identity is shaped by the enduring heritage of the Soviet past, a resurgent nationalism, an Islamic revival (also including its radical forms) and pro-Western democratic aspirations. The artists presented in this exhibition reflect, explore, or draw upon one or another of the contradictions found today in their countries – caught for two decades in a painful process of transition.
Critical Machines (Exhibition and Conference)
MARCH 6 – AUGUST 5, 2014 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
Artists in the Exhibition: Art & Language, Burak Arikan, Freee art collective, Janah Hilwé, Khalil Rabah, Vadim Zakharov
And
A Bookshelf with critical machines by: André Breton, Critical Art Ensemble, Marcel Duchamp, Andrea Fraser, Heresies Collective, William Hogarth, György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay (Artpool), Kenneth Goldsmith, Hans Haacke & Pierre Bourdieu, Pablo Helguera, Garnet Hertz, Wassily Kandinsky, Allan Kaprow, Hassan Khan, Andrei Monastyrsky, William Morris, Walid Raad, Ad Reinhardt, Temporary Services, Gregory Sholette, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi and others
In the language of contemporary labor processes and manufacturing equipment, a “critical machine” is a piece of equipment designated and programmed to monitor and report on other machines in the production chain. Critical machines are deployed as preventive maintenance measures to guard against equipment malfunctioning and the disruption of the production flow. The main goal of the critical machine is to inform the human operator about urgently required systemic adjustments.
Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm (1896-1971)
NOVEMBER 21 – APRIL 19, 2014 (AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Beirut)
The exhibition Lebanese Painterly Humanism: Georges D. Corm (1896-1971) organized by the AUB Art Gallery sets on display the work of the Lebanese painter, writer and cultural activist Georges Daoud Corm. Rather than mount a survey show of Corm’s numerous paintings and drawings, we have decided to exhibit his works in accordance with one motive: a reflection upon Corm’s aesthetic position, expressed in his art but also and more eloquently in his writings. His Essai sur l'art et la civilisation de ce temps (written in two stages during the 1960s) can be called a manifesto of painterly humanism. Here Corm most clearly enunciates his aesthetic and intellectual position, which can be broadly defined as a European humanism firmly anchored in Christian ethics. It is with this text in mind, which we republish on the occasion of this event, that we select and display Georges D. Corm’s paintings and drawings.
Art in Labor: Skill, Deskilling, Rescilling
MAY 20 – JULY 27, 2013 (AUB Byblos Bank Art Gallery, Beirut)
Artists: Georges Daoud Corm, Saliba Douaihy, John Carswell, Ghassan El Hajj, Khalid Hamza, Haitham Hassan, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mahmoud Khaled, Mohammad El Rawas, Gregory Sholette, Hito Steyerl, Rachid Wehbi, Vera Yeramian.
This exhibition examines the complex relation between art and labor. Its purpose is not to honor or celebrate labor as one of the activities essential to the human condition—the socialist realists have done this very well in the past. Instead, we look at art itself as a form of production, inquiring what kinds of labor enter into its making—its birth.
Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon
APRIL 5 – AUGUST 24, 2013 (AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum Beirut)
The American University of Beirut Art Gallery presents the exhibition Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon. The exhibition examines practices of art collecting and art patronage in contemporary Lebanon. On display are ten video interviews conducted with private art collectors and inheritors of collections including Saleh Barakat, Anachar Basbous, Georges Corm, Raymond Audi, Abraham Karabajakian, Ramzi Saidi and Afaf Osseiran Saidi and Tony Salamé. The art critic and publisher Cesar Nammour offers a historical perspective on the practice of art collecting, while Zeina Arida of the Arab Image Foundation speaks about collecting as an artistic strategy. Dima Raad, of the Ministry of Culture of Lebanon, also offers her perspective. On the lower floor of the gallery, the house of a Lebanese art collector—inspired by the home of the collector Samir Saleeby—has been reconstructed.
Khalil Saleeby (1870-1928): A Founder of Modern Art in Lebanon
MAY 2012 (AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum Beirut)
Over the summer and fall of 1928, newspapers in Beirut relayed the details of a dramatic story: the painter Khalil Saleeby and his foreign wife Carrie Aude had been killed following a dispute over water rights. Related historical documents reveal fragments of the public and judiciary debates of the time, offering glimpses not only of a long-forgotten and tragic conflict, but also of the social perception of the new profession of picture-maker almost a century ago.
In the news reports about Khalil Saleeby and Carrie Aude’s murder, one finds not only the tragic conclusions of two personal stories but also the articulation of broader social and historical contradictions: the confrontation of late Ottoman and French colonial sensibilities, metropolitan and peripheral lifestyles, urban and peasant economies. Clashes of such epic proportions are often resolved through individual sacrifice.
Music in Me (Chapter 1): Concerting an Exhibition
2002 GAK Bremen
"The Music in Me” was an exhibition – concert in the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen. It originated as a project that intended to present music – produced, documented or addressed – in works by contemporary visual artists. The exhibition explored diverse ways of dealing with popular, rock or folk music.
The set up of the "show” takes a rather "Greenbergian” modernist approach, which highlights the characteristic method of a certain discipline. As in the case of contemporary pop or rock music whose "canvas” and "paint” is its sound and video, thus we invited for this event artists who are producing audio and video rather then traditional objects that relate to music.
Unfortunately last Sunday afternoon somebody left the door open...
2000 Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht; Het Domein Museum, Sittard; KSA:K Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau
Unfortunately last Sunday afternoon somebody left the door open... is the title of Part of a collaborative project between a Museum of Contemporary in the Netherlands (Het Domein Museum Sittaard), a Dutch postgraduate center for artists, designers and theorists (Jan van Eyck Academie) and a center of contemporary art from Eastern Europe (KSA:K Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau Moldova). The project, which consisted of an exhibition at Het Domein as well as a two-volume publication investigating the history of art institutions in the contemporary world, and across the West/East geopolitical and cultural borders. Part one of the project...
Gioconda’s Smile: from mythic to techno ritual (International performance art festival – the third annual exhibition of SCCA Chisinau)
1998 SCCA, Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau Moldova
First festival of performance art in Moldova.
Mesage de la Tzara/REflectii in RE (Second Annual Exhibition of SCCA Chisinau)
1997 SCCA, Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau Moldova
CarbonART-97: Summer Camp for Artists
Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Ungheni, Moldova 1997
The second artist colony called CarbonART took place in the summer of 1997. For this edition of Carbonart the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Chișinău has invited artists from neighboring countries: Odessa (Ukraine) and from different regions of Romania.
Kilometru 6/The 6th Kilometer (First Annual Exhibition of SCCA Chisinau)
1996 SCCA, Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau Moldova
The first annual exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (Chișinău) opened on November 14, 1996 in the main exhibition hall of the Union of Artists of Moldova under the title Kilometrul 6 (The 6th Kilometer). Most of the participating artists had already been part of the Carbonart 96 artist camp, and a few of the exhibited works were in fact produced during that summer retreat (see Carbonart 96). For this first annual exhibition, the SCCA rented the Union of Artists’ main exhibition hall, and commissioned works by way of offering grants to a select group of Moldovan artists. The latter were intended exclusively for the production and display of works of contemporary art, as this phrase was inscribed in the name and the mission statement of the newly established art center. The selection of artists was made by the curator and staff and approved by the SCCA Chișinău “Advisory board,” in full accordance with the equal opportunities policies established by the Open Society Institute and the regional director of the SCCA Network.
CarbonART-96: Summer Camp for Artists
Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Sadova Calarasi, Moldova 1996
The artist colony CarbonART took place in the summer of 1996 in an abandoned Soviet Young Pioneers summer camp near Sadova (Călărași, Moldova). CarbonART 96 was first of its kind in Moldova, and even though “artist camps” or literally “camps of creation” (as these artist retreats or colonies were often called: tăbără de creație in Romanian, or tvorcheskii lager’ in Russian) were fairly common in the USSR and other socialist and non-socialist states, this one differed in specifically targeting and inviting “artists who worked with new concepts and modes of artistic expression,” as the newspaper ad posted by the organizer – the recently founded Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) Chișinău – stated
Barbie's Funeral: Exodus
Chisinau 1995, (Art and Culture Program, Open Society Institute Moldova)
This action organized by Octavian Esanu, Albert Svet and Iurie Moroianu had its main protagonist the Chisinau-based artist Mark Verlan. (1963-2020). Mark invited the city to participate in the funeral of a Barbie doll with a missing leg. Actors from Ionescu theater in Chisinau also participated in the mass performance.
