ART CITIES:Beirut – Rania Stephan
Rania Stephan has been working with film for the last 20 years. Stephan’s body of work may at first appear perplexingly heterogeneous, ranging from video art to raw documentary, yet its underlying coherence stems from her country of origin, Lebanon, which stands at a crossroads of cultures and influences, East and West, and remains a place of both exile and return.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marfa’ Archive
Rania Stephan focuses on what she calls “The archaeology of images, identity, and memory”, her solo exhibition “On Never Being Simply One”, is driven by the differences between images, still and moving, the trace of an absence that is originary to those images. Approaching images like an editor (part detective, part cinephile), the artist investigates how images collide and collude, multiply and subtract. Produced between 2010 and today, the works of the exhibition fall between two of Stephan’s major film projects “The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosny” (2011) and the ongoing “Memories for a Private Eye” (2015-). They present Stephan’s obsessive examination of the relationships between still and moving images, documentary and fiction, death and presence. “The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni” (2011), is an elegiac installation about the career and mythology of the renowned Egyptian actress and star Soad Hosni (1943-2001), who, in 2001, allegedly committed suicide in London. Structured like a three-act classical tragedy, the work appropriates footage from 82 VHS copies of the feature films in which Hosni starred between 1959 and 1991. By montaging scenes from the format in which most of Hosni’s fans experienced her films, Stephan proposes a singular and poetic rewriting of a lost golden age of Egyptian cinema. Irreverent, playful, and serious, Stephan’s work reexamines the legacy of complex representations of the modern Arab woman. The trilogy “Memories for a Private Eye” (2015-), is a 30-minute montage through 80 videotapes she shot in the 1980s. A friend insisted on digitizing them for her before they became impossible to transfer. Stephan couldn’t remember what was on the tapes, but she knew she was looking for footage of her mother. These excerpts from the videotapes plus scenes from Otto Preminger’s “Laura” (1944), the Lumière Brothers’ “Serpentine Dance” (1899) and “Mufetish Wahid”, a detective series that was made for Lebanese television in the early 1970s. Stephan’s work is at once a love letter to film noir and an attempt to address great personal trauma (her mother’s death during the shelling of a building_ without mentioning it directly. As such, it finds a new route into the old subject of Lebanon’s civil war through the conventions of detective fiction that flow freely from Mexico City to Mumbai. The first part of the trilogy, was released in 2015, she is currently working on parts two and three.
Info: Marfa’, P.O. Box 11-4496, Beirut, Duration: 25/5-60/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat 14:00-18:00, https://marfaprojects.com
