The Beirut River no longer lives up to its name. Where water once flowed, attracting families who would cool off with a swim in summer, a filthy trickle of sludge now oozes down the middle of the wide concrete canal separating Beirut's wealthy Achrafieh neighbourhood from the city's eastern suburbs.
In Under-Writing Beirut, Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige takes the river and its urban surroundings as the starting point for an in-depth exploration of the area's complex history, its development as an industrial sector and its current, rapid gentrification.
Joreige's work seeks to find a point of encounter between personal experience and collective memory, often weaving together documentary and fictive elements. In Under-Writing Beirut, a multi-year ongoing project, she delves back into the past, uncovering the events and narratives that have shaped the contemporary urban fabric and identity of different neighbourhoods.
"The word 'under-writing' means under the writing," she says. "It evokes the idea of a palimpsest, of digging different layers in specific locations in the city to propose poetic forms, and what stories and narratives come out, based on the different locations, that I can investigate."
The artist began the project in 2013 with Under-Writing Beirut: Mathaf, a project exploring the history of her own neighbourhood, named for the National Museum of Beirut. The sculptures, installation and video she produced reflected on the museum's location on the demarcation line that divided Beirut during the 1975-1990 civil war and the material damage done by snipers who occupied the building.
The second and third chapters of the series, Under-Writing Beirut: Nahr and Under-Writing Beirut: Ouzai are currently on show for the first time in the Lebanese capital, at the Marfa' gallery. Like her exploration of the Mathaf area, Joreige's works inspired by the Beirut River are infused with personal experience. In 2009, Joreige and curator Sandra Dagher founded the Beirut Art Centre in Jisr El-Wati, an industrial neighbourhood explored in a three-channel video installation, After the River.
"The installation speaks of the social history of the river through different waves of migrants that started in 1915, and the Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians and later Syrians who settled along the river banks," she says. "Then it focuses on the small area adjacent to the river, around Beirut Art Centre, which is currently being gentrified."
The 20-minute film tracks how the area has changed, via interviews with an elderly industrialist whose family used to own a metalworking factory beside the river and the Syrian janitor of the Beirut Art Centre. Much of the film focuses on the thousands of Syrian labourers who work on the construction sites, slowly transforming the fabric of the neighbourhood from derelict factories into prime residential real estate.
As in cities all over the world, pioneering art venues – including Beirut Art Centre, Ashkal Alwan and Station – have helped to attract visitors and transform perceptions of the neighbourhood. Now, they are becoming the victims of gentrification. “I see it with sadness. Unfortunately, without knowing, we probably contributed to the gentrification of the area,” Joreige says. “The Beirut Art Centre will have to leave and relocate because of the costs, because it’s becoming a residential area; because the land is worth much more now.”
Accompanying the installation is a series of delicate drawings in wax, pencil, pastel and crayon, based on the topography of the river in different maps of the city. Meandering lines bloom suddenly into patches of colour that evoke flowers or the interior of the human body – an inflated lung, the meandering patterns of blood vessels or the curves and bulges of a brain.
In the next room, the Ouzai chapter of her work takes a different direction. With no personal link to Ouzai, Joreige spent many hours interviewing local residents. The stories they told her, along with information gleaned from legal and historical documents, is conveyed through a series of 15 pencil drawings accompanied by typed blocks of text, entitled A Brief History of Ouzai.
Joreige delves into legal battles over the ownership of the land as far back as 1856. In the 1950s, when settlers from the Bekaa Valley and south Lebanon began to build on Ouzai's pristine sand dunes, a court ruled that the land was private, triggering a spate of illegal building. Massive expansion occurred in the 1970s, when thousands of villagers from south Lebanon were driven from their homes by Israeli incursions, many eventually settling in Beirut's southern suburbs.
Joreige shares the stories of several members of the prominent Nasser family, among the earliest settlers of Ouzai. Salah Nasser recalls how as a child in 1973, he witnessed an Israeli attack in which two of his uncles were killed and his brother was shot in the leg. The attack destroyed their family home, which had been used as a base by Palestinian fighters.
The headmaster of a local school says that people from surrounding areas used to come to Ouzai to eat in its fish restaurants and swim in the sea, before over-population led to sewage being dumped into the water. “I haven’t swam in Ouzai for 30 years,” he says.
Joreige was drawn to study Ouzai in part because of its hazy legal status. “It’s a very complex place that has transformed so much over the years, from sand dunes to almost a slum,” she says. “It’s a microcosm of the problems we deal with in Lebanon, such as the urban fabric and density of population, construction, displacement, sectarianism, infrastructure, the relationship between the state and the community, the limits of the state and the complex relationships between public and private.”
A series of four digital collages entitled Ouzai: Cartography of a Transformation, is based on aerial photographs of the neighbourhood taken between 1956 and this year. Joreige has stitched together overlapping photos to convey the gradual transformation of Ouzai.
Under-Writing Beirut is an eye-opening exhibition. Through a mixture of personal experience, archival research, oral testimony and imagination, Joreige reveals the hidden histories that have shaped the modern city and the memories and narratives that underpin its contemporary identity.
Under-Writing Beirut continues at Marfa’ in Beirut until December 29
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The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Vidaamuyarchi
Director: Magizh Thirumeni
Stars: Ajith Kumar, Arjun Sarja, Trisha Krishnan, Regina Cassandra
Rating: 4/5
Pathaan
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Miss Granny
Director: Joyce Bernal
Starring: Sarah Geronimo, James Reid, Xian Lim, Nova Villa
3/5
(Tagalog with Eng/Ar subtitles)
BIGGEST CYBER SECURITY INCIDENTS IN RECENT TIMES
SolarWinds supply chain attack: Came to light in December 2020 but had taken root for several months, compromising major tech companies, governments and its entities
Microsoft Exchange server exploitation: March 2021; attackers used a vulnerability to steal emails
Kaseya attack: July 2021; ransomware hit perpetrated REvil, resulting in severe downtime for more than 1,000 companies
Log4j breach: December 2021; attackers exploited the Java-written code to inflitrate businesses and governments
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'Of Love & War'
Lynsey Addario, Penguin Press
Teams in the EHL
White Bears, Al Ain Theebs, Dubai Mighty Camels, Abu Dhabi Storms, Abu Dhabi Scorpions and Vipers
MATCH INFO
Juventus 1 (Dybala 45')
Lazio 3 (Alberto 16', Lulic 73', Cataldi 90 4')
Red card: Rodrigo Bentancur (Juventus)
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
The Brutalist
Director: Brady Corbet
Stars: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn
Rating: 3.5/5
Earth under attack: Cosmic impacts throughout history
- 4.5 billion years ago: Mars-sized object smashes into the newly-formed Earth, creating debris that coalesces to form the Moon
- 66 million years ago: 10km-wide asteroid crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, wiping out over 70 per cent of living species – including the dinosaurs.
- 50,000 years ago: 50m-wide iron meteor crashes in Arizona with the violence of 10 megatonne hydrogen bomb, creating the famous 1.2km-wide Barringer Crater
- 1490: Meteor storm over Shansi Province, north-east China when large stones “fell like rain”, reportedly leading to thousands of deaths.
- 1908: 100-metre meteor from the Taurid Complex explodes near the Tunguska river in Siberia with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima-type bombs, devastating 2,000 square kilometres of forest.
- 1998: Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaks apart and crashes into Jupiter in series of impacts that would have annihilated life on Earth.
-2013: 10,000-tonne meteor burns up over the southern Urals region of Russia, releasing a pressure blast and flash that left over 1600 people injured.
Company profile
Name: Fruitful Day
Founders: Marie-Christine Luijckx, Lyla Dalal AlRawi, Lindsey Fournie
Based: Dubai, UAE
Founded: 2015
Number of employees: 30
Sector: F&B
Funding so far: Dh3 million
Future funding plans: None at present
Future markets: Saudi Arabia, potentially Kuwait and other GCC countries
Libya's Gold
UN Panel of Experts found regime secretly sold a fifth of the country's gold reserves.
The panel’s 2017 report followed a trail to West Africa where large sums of cash and gold were hidden by Abdullah Al Senussi, Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief, in 2011.
Cases filled with cash that was said to amount to $560m in 100 dollar notes, that was kept by a group of Libyans in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
A second stash was said to have been held in Accra, Ghana, inside boxes at the local offices of an international human rights organisation based in France.
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
1. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape their pull
2. They can be created when massive stars collapse under their own weight
3. Large black holes can also be formed when smaller ones collide and merge
4. The biggest black holes lurk at the centre of many galaxies, including our own
5. Astronomers believe that when the universe was very young, black holes affected how galaxies formed
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League semi-final, second leg
Roma 4
Milner (15' OG), Dzeko (52'), Nainggolan (86', 90 4')
Liverpool 2
Mane (9'), Wijnaldum (25')
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Ticket prices
General admission Dh295 (under-three free)
Buy a four-person Family & Friends ticket and pay for only three tickets, so the fourth family member is free
Buy tickets at: wbworldabudhabi.com/en/tickets
Tickets
Tickets start at Dh100 for adults, while children can enter free on the opening day. For more information, visit www.mubadalawtc.com.
How to avoid crypto fraud
- Use unique usernames and passwords while enabling multi-factor authentication.
- Use an offline private key, a physical device that requires manual activation, whenever you access your wallet.
- Avoid suspicious social media ads promoting fraudulent schemes.
- Only invest in crypto projects that you fully understand.
- Critically assess whether a project’s promises or returns seem too good to be true.
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- Store funds in hardware wallets as opposed to online exchanges.
The biog
Title: General Practitioner with a speciality in cardiology
Previous jobs: Worked in well-known hospitals Jaslok and Breach Candy in Mumbai, India
Education: Medical degree from the Government Medical College in Nagpur
How it all began: opened his first clinic in Ajman in 1993
Family: a 90-year-old mother, wife and two daughters
Remembers a time when medicines from India were purchased per kilo
