(MENAFN– Al-Bayan)
The Lebanese painter Ali Shams El-Din simulates with the speaking brush the crises of collapse, homelessness and displacement, and launches what he calls a “color revolution” on all the devastation facing his country in an art exhibition that opened Thursday night in Hamra Street in Beirut and will continue until the third of next January.
Lebanon witnessed a sharp economic decline, which entered its fourth year, which led to the currency losing more than 95 percent of its value and pushed eight out of ten Lebanese into poverty, according to United Nations estimates. Shams El-Din collected the disappointments of the previous years and carried them on board plastic paintings that reflect the rejection of reality, form its alternative world, and express the years of brokenness.
Shams El-Din’s paintings simulate the tragedy of forced migration and the loss of places where people lived, and “their lives depend on a tent, a pill or a sack of flour,” as the Lebanese painter told Archyde.com.
The exhibition’s paintings came under the title “No Place and Lost Time,” which Shams El-Din explained, saying, “Today’s reality is a creation of yesterday, and both are open to the unknown.”
Plates
A leaflet distributed about the exhibition stated that Shams El-Din “began working on his paintings with the start of the Arab Spring and the violence and blood that accompanied it, passing through the economic and social collapse in Lebanon that displaced families and individuals to four corners of the earth, leading to the Beirut port explosion on the fateful fourth of August, Who destroyed half of the city and drowned it in darkness and dust.
An explosion of chemicals that had been stored in the port of Beirut for more than seven years killed at least 215 people in 2020 and caused widespread destruction in the city. In a place resembling abandoned houses on the famous Hamra Street, which was a hotbed for intellectuals in its cafes, Shams El-Din displays his paintings on the walls of (Dar Al-Musawwar), whose rooms embrace dozens of old cameras hanging on the walls as abstract paintings aged through time.
engineering
And on the stairs of (Dar Al-Musawwar), which preserves an architecture that was not distorted by the bulldozers of architectural civilization, visitors receive posters of old Egyptian and Arab films that take them to the cinema of the last century.
Next to each painting, Shams al-Din was keen to write meaningful phrases such as (before the departure begins), (waiting for Godot), (what is left for us?) and (what will we plant when we return?).
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