Ejecta

Ejecta is an immersive audio-visual installation which transforms the digital images of every artwork in the Sursock Museum’s permanent collection into vibrating pixel-like fragments which progress through various states; becoming volcanic expulsions of light and later cascading through the frame like water or lava. The artist opposes decay and destruction with an inverted violence, overwhelming the viewer’s senses with the weapons of art, culture, and thought.

Paired with the ceaseless flow of images is the broken, dissonant, noise of a blast which morphs into the resonance of a glass harmonica. Moultaka draws inspiration from the 17th century Leçons des ténèbres (Lessons of darkness), a polyphonic French baroque music composed by Charpentier, as well as from one of his own previous compositions, Exercice de lumières (2017). In Moultaka’s work, the clinking glass refers to the church’s stained-glass windows which give rise to a melodic and consoling hope. The installation invokes catharsis, allowing fragments and ruins to mutate into crystalline sparks. Ejecta –originally defined as volcanic ejected particles– expels the darkness, to form a crater of light.

On the outside walls of the installation, the artist invites viewers to write a sentence and participate into a communal conjuring – a performative gesture to be practiced as a healing ritual.

With the support of Galerie Tanit- Naila Kettaneh-Kunigk.

Zad Moultaka

b. 1967, Beirut, Lebanon

Lives and works in Paris

Zad Moultaka is a composer and a visual artist. During the war, he left Lebanon to study at Conservatoire de Paris where he abandoned his international career as an interpreter to devote himself to composition and visual art. In 2007, Moultaka was awarded the SACEM – Claude Arrieu Prize, and in 2017, the Critics' Prize for best musical creation. His musical collaborations include Delirio (Deutsche Oper Berlin), Hémon (Opéra national du Rhin; music, direction, scenography and costumes by Zad Moultaka, libretto by Paul Audi), and Requiem for a New World, based on Etel Adnan's final libretto (Basilica S.S. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice). His visual productions, installations, paintings, photographs, and videos were recently shown at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec (Bignan), Tanit Gallery (Munich), Totah Gallery (New York), and the Centre Pompidou (Metz). In 2017, he created ŠamaŠ for the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, Moultaka exhibited ŠamaŠ at the Sursock Museum and Don’t Fall at the Rashid Karami International Fair in Tripoli.