• Marwa Arsanios
• Mirene Arsanios
• Chaghig Arzoumanian
• Roy Dib
• Chafa Ghaddar
• Sirine Fattouh
• Rachel Higgins
• David Johnson
• Helene Kazan
• Dages Juvelier Keates
• Jessika Khazrik
• Lara Tabet
• Elizabeth Tubergen
• Jody Wood

Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens

“City and City” takes as its point of origin the idea that perception is central to the organization of the city. This derives from an insight lucidly articulated in the murder-mystery novel by China Miéville, The City and The City, which is about two imaginary cities that are intertwined, Beszel and Ul Qoma. Although they occupy the same geographical space, their respective citizens are bound by law to perceive only those buildings, people, activities, etc. taking place in their own city. The breach between Beszel and Ul Qoma is therefore primarily ideological, as it depends on each city’s willingness to systematically un-see all aspects of life pertaining to the other city. Miéville’s novel revolves around the myriad acts of de-recognition necessary to maintain the illusion of two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, an illusion upon which their common civil order is founded.

In this exhibition Beirut is the City and New York is the City. Together they are the City and the City. They are bound to one another here because each is being destroyed, or “killed” in Henri Lefebvre’s dramatic description of capitalism’s structural violence. To kill a city is to make its space homogenous, or to drain it of irreconcilable difference. The works in “City and City”—which include installation, sculpture, photography, video—obliquely posit real estate development and its avatars as a form of violence against the city when such development makes the city’s history hard to see, easy to un-see.

The show is loosely split between artists based in New York and artists based in Beirut, although like many of their generation these artists’ association to a place is ambiguous and layered. Elizabeth Tubergen’s sculpture, commissioned for this exhibition, pictures the interval between the gallery and the street as—literally—a reflective space for the visitor to sit and watch 5th Avenue. Marwa Arsanios’s animation depicts a modernist resort’s tentative transformation into refugee housing. Helene Kazan’s sound installation tries to produce in the viewer an awareness of the invisible, perpetual risk of catastrophe that the contemporary city of glass and glossy advertising is at great pains to obscure. Lara Tabet’s eerie photographs picture nocturnal gay cruising in Beirut on the waterfront land that is in the process of being privatized for commercial development. In each artist’s work there is some specific articulation of the City’s violent homogenization by Capital, but there is also a poetic openness to some common loss. These works are bound together by their attention to the effects of structural violence and to minute acts of perception as resistance.