Unpredictable Times

As part of Festival du film franco-arabe de Noisy-le-Sec
Programme: Cinéma Le Trianon

From drawing to sculpture, and from installation to video, the work of Sirine Fattouh (born in 1980 in Beirut; lives and works in Paris and Beirut) plumbs Lebanon’s turbulent history as well as questions of gender and sexual identity.

Unpredictable Times is a four-part project about Sirine Fattouh’s relationship to Beirut, wherein the second portion—the film Behind the Shield—offers a filmic portrait of the city through the lens of an on-board camera affixed to the windshield of her car. These dashcam-like glimpses document the watershed moments in the country’s recent history: the popular revolts of October 2019, the Covid-19 lockdown, or the explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020.

Presented in the basement of La Galerie, the installation Unpredictable Times unfolds as a reflection both intimate and political, in which the video Behind the Shield joins a series of drawings realized between 2019 and 2021. It’s a space in which Sirine Fattouh proposes “to replay the past, to reappropriate it with a critical distance and to speak [one’s] personal story while juxtaposing it with the story of Lebanon, a story of wars and of exile” [1].

[1] Extract from an interview between Sirine Fattouh and Marc Bembekoff, October 18, 2023.