Annabel Daou and the people of Beirut: Mathaf Mathaf | Chou Hayda?

In November of 2017, people from across Beirut came to the National Museum and gave their voices to a number of objects in the collection. The people spoke to and for and about these objects from the past, and, in doing so, they revealed fragments of the present. They did not attempt to disclose a particular historical narrative. Nor did they attempt to create a fiction. They did not lie and they did not try to tell the truth.

Chou Hayda? is an audio guide which could be experienced at the National Museum of Beirut and online. Grounded in the participatory approach to art making; it explores the ways in which the art object or artifact is imbued with social, political, moral, and personal meaning as it is received across time and within shifting cultural contexts. This audio guide is a culled experience of the present moment at the museum, facing these archeological objects with a contemporary view, bringing them into our lives now, and leaving a piece of our lives within their story.

For the making of the audio guide artist Annabel Daou invited several groups of people to take part in accompanied visits to the National Museum of Beirut during which they were asked a series of questions, prompting them to reimagine the histories and purposes of objects in the collection. This collaboration captures language from the various participants’ responses and reworks them into a script that has been partly recorded by professional Lebanese actors (Julia Kassar and Georges Khabbaz) whose performed voices enable the institutional authority in the audio guide, while the smart, funny, and wildly historically inaccurate responses of the participants subvert it.

It also playfully challenges the authority of official history; inviting imagination, speculation, and misunderstanding.

This commission positions the museum as a space that includes not only the voices of the artists, artisans, curators and historians but of the visitors who view and experience the collection in the present.

Program
May 18
Launch

5pm: Launch of the commission at the National Museum of Beirut and Online
5:30pm: Conversation between curator Amanda Abi Khalil and artist Annabel Daou
6–7pm: Reception open for all

May 24
Panel Discussion

Museum Objects as Subjects: Interpretative Methods and Art Practice
Seats are limited, RSVP info [​at​] temporaryartplatform.com

Speakers
Annabel Daou, Visual artist
Ali Cherri, Visual artist
Avani Tanya, Visual artist
Eric de Visscher, Researcher and Museum Consultant

Discussant
David Markus, Art Critic and Educator

The panel will explore ways in which museum collections can be used to activate alternative narratives commenting on our present time by means of interpretative methods, participatory commissions or artistic inquiries. How can we look at archeological/ethnographic artifacts outside the realm of the institutional and curatorial narratives they are framed within? How can these objects instigate other ways of seeing and listening inside and outside the museum? The panelists will present responses based on their own work and research followed by a conversation moderated by art critic David Markus.

Commissioner: Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA) in collaboration with Temporary Art Platform
Curator: Amanda Abi Khalil
Assistant: Nour Osseiran
Sound Design and collaboration : Nadim Mishlawi, DB Studios
Visual Design: Layerframe Studios
Graphic Design: Office for Special Projects.co
Media Relations: Soapbox
Trailer Director and Editor: Lea Cremona
With the voices of Julia Kassar, Georges Khabbaz, and the people of Beirut

Mathaf Mathaf | Chou Hayda is an audio guide project by contemporary artist Annabel Daou and the people of Beirut. It is a commission by BeMA in collaboration with Temporary Art Platform (TAP) with the partnership of the Ministry of Culture / Directorate General of Antiquities and the National Museum of Beirut.