Capturing the Ephemeral

The Sursock Museum presents a conversation between artist Karine Wehbé, Waddah Charara, and Frank Darwiche. The discussion runs in parallel to Wehbé’s exhibition Capturing the Ephemeral, organized by Beirut Art Residency (BAR). The exhibition will be on view at the BAR Project Space from Wednesday 11 April to Friday 11 May.

Wehbé’s work investigates the beach resorts of Northern Lebanon. The conversation will touch on the absence, presence, and displacement of objects, events, and sentiment. Using photography as a medium for documentation while geo-mapping narratives, Wehbé attempts to capture and mediate past histories.

As part of the program, there will be a screening of Wehbé and Nadim Tabet’s short film, Summer 91 (2014).

Karine Wehbé is an artist and graphic designer based in Beirut. She obtained a diploma in Graphic Arts from the Paris School of Graphic Arts (Esag Penninghen) in 1996. She has exhibited her work at the Beirut Art Center (2008) and co-directed Summer 91 (2014), whicj won the Pavilion Award and Sacem Prize. Wehbe also co-directed It's the war in Syria that killed her (2016), which screened at Videoworks and Pantin Festival. More recently, Wehbe created the publication Stop Here for Happy Holiday (2017), funded by the Sharjah Biennale. Through photography, cinema, archival footage, and geographic maps, her work interweaves intimate and public chronicles, drawing on adolescent experiences, cinematographic and musical influences, and the mechanisms of memory and nostalgia.

Waddah Charara is a Lebanese writer, journalist, translator, and professor of sociology. He was actively engaged in politics and syndicate activism until he cut his activities short just prior to the outbreak of the Lebanese wars. Choosing to devote his time to writing, Charara has written on diverse subjects spanning Lebanese political and social issues, Islamic political movements, literature, poetry, and cinema.

After studying with the Lassalian brothers, Frank Darwiche moved to Europe while the Lebanese Civil War was raging, settling in both France and the UK. Afterwards, Darwiche moved to the United States where he graduated from Ohio State University with a Master's degree in literature and a specialization in Medieval thought. He then pursued a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Burgundy in Dijon. Darwiche is the author of several articles on Heidegger and ontology as well as the book Heidegger : Le Divin et Le Quadriparti (2013). He taught philosophy at the École Nationale Superieure d'Art in Dijon and is currently professor of philosophy at the University of Balamand, Lebanon.