Launched in 2023, BAC Central Hall Commission is an annual spatial intervention in Beirut Art Center‘s central hall.
At a time where our worlds continue to shrink and where public and personal spaces are increasingly contested in our daily life, the BAC Central Hall Commission is a proposal to experiment with the types of worlds and territories that we may be able to create for ourselves and for each other within our existing realities. The commission employs Beirut Art Center’s entry hall as its testing ground, offering an annual invitation for an artist/architect/designer to transform it into a place of convergence and action, but also one of rest and contemplation. It’s an attempt to rethink the ways we inhabit a place and what a different configuration of elements might allow us to do within these rigid, and functionally predetermined destinations.
For the first iteration, artist Marwan Rechmaoui will create Municipalities, a proposal for a space within a space. An inhabited sculpture that behaves erratically and formally all at once. A nursery of thoughts, books, sounds, networks and relations, it’s a self declared autonomous structure that contemplates processes of everyday life and the warping of time. The pyramid-like structure offers a space to consider questions around how to withdraw and (re)build worlds and territories that have different signifiers, insights and realizations.
In an effort to understand how we can continue to collect varying and discordant sounds yet remain harmonious, Municipalities is accompanied by a series of four commissioned music compositions which are played live and then installed for a period of time each. Open for interpretation of use, Municipalities will also host diffrenet types of activities throughout its 6 months installation period in the BAC central hall, including moments of reflection and much needed respite.
This commission has been made possible with thee support of Rafi Manoukian.
Press release from Beirut Art Center
Image: Marwan Rechmaoui. Municipalities. 2023. Epoxy painted metal, glass, drywall, 5.4 x 3, 7.65 metres. Photography by Youssef Itani. Image courtesy of Beirut Art Center
