This conversation brings together four figures based in Lebanon—two artists (Vartan Avakian and Walid Sadek), a curator and museum director (Reem Shahid), and a visual anthropologist (Kirsten Scheid)—in conversation with the author about the ways in which art in Lebanon is, or has been, at risk as a result of the nation's multiple precarities: social, political, and economic. These precarities are discussed in relation to both the present crises that Lebanon faces during an extended period of protracted war on two borders and in the aftermath of the 2019 uprising and the 2020 Port Blast, which damaged important galleries and museums including Marfa Projects, Galerie Sfeir Semmler, and the Sursock Museum. More importantly, however, these precarities come to frame the longer history of debate about what art is and who it should serve that has taken place in the region since the end of the Ottoman Empire. While the conversation attends to the kinds of risk associated with censorship and sectarian strife, including the assassination of Lokman Slim, the proposed censorship of Mashrou’ Leila, and the intimidation of Bilal Khbeiz, more attention is given to the risk that arts communities face as a result of the expectation that art serve a dedicated political purpose articulated through descriptive or activist content rather than through form or the imaginative processes that it might inspire to cohere new social realities.

This letter turns to late-nineteenth-century understandings of photography in Arabic as al-taswir al-shamsi —which translates roughly as “solar imaging”—to read a suite of photographs by Ahlam Shibli that depicts the ways in which martyrs of the second intifada are remembered in Nablus. Drawing on connotations embedded in the Arabic term taswir and in a careful study of the way light works in Shibli's photographs, the letter—addressed to you from a person who identifies as a pillar of salt, stuck, looking back but wanting to move forward—makes the argument that, far from indexing a past built on death and displacement, the photographs give light to an alternate social reality in which the Palestinian lives free from the constraints of life as the Israeli's have allowed it, which is to say life as a condition of death.

Le peuple constitue ses propres archives. —Michel Foucault, 1974