Marwan Rechmaoui

  • Marwan Rechmaoui draws on the urban and material fabric of the city to construct a sweeping and visceral historicity of Beirut’s atomized and contested narratives. His practice deploys both scholarly and embodied knowledges of architecture, language, oral history, literature, and economics to articulate some of the major questions of a ‘generation’ of artists. Rechmaoui’s work reveals, through unapologetically formalist methods, the violence of nationalism, collective identity, and social class structures. Through works such as Blue Building, Monument for the Living, If I Only Had a Chance, Spectre, The Coop, and the Pillars and Tapestries series, he demonstrates that materials such as concrete, rubber, tar, wood, and glass, when used to map a seemingly trivial neighborhood or replicate a building, can act as informed substances, archival records, or even living testaments to an epoch. The materials Rechmaoui uses form a politico-aesthetic proposition through which a multi-layered city and its native, exiled, and refugee inhabitants can identify their respective pasts, investigate a shared present, and speculate on potential futures. Rechmaoui’s oeuvre conveys the histories and complexities of our quotidian landscapes, as well as captures the sustained maneuvers of violence and legacies of collective struggle that permeate the walls and roadways of our cities and built environment.

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Marwan Rechmaoui

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Marwan Rechmaoui draws on the urban and material fabric of the city to construct a sweeping and visceral historicity of Beirut’s atomized and contested narratives. His practice deploys both scholarly and embodied knowledges of architecture, language, oral history, literature, and economics to articulate some of the major questions of a ‘generation’ of artists. Rechmaoui’s work reveals, through unapologetically formalist methods, the violence of nationalism, collective identity, and social class structures. Through works such as Blue Building, Monument for the Living, If I Only Had a Chance, Spectre, The Coop, and the Pillars and Tapestries series, he demonstrates that materials such as concrete, rubber, tar, wood, and glass, when used to map a seemingly trivial neighborhood or replicate a building, can act as informed substances, archival records, or even living testaments to an epoch. The materials Rechmaoui uses form a politico-aesthetic proposition through which a multi-layered city and its native, exiled, and refugee inhabitants can identify their respective pasts, investigate a shared present, and speculate on potential futures. Rechmaoui’s oeuvre conveys the histories and complexities of our quotidian landscapes, as well as captures the sustained maneuvers of violence and legacies of collective struggle that permeate the walls and roadways of our cities and built environment.