Previous works - INSTALLATIONS

Being from the first post civil-war generation, transforming accidental monuments of bitterness in the city into choreographed installations dancing with the wind, was a necessity. It is my poetic method of rebelling against religious sectarianism.
“Burj El Hawa” (2018) was the highlight of my war traces works that I produced before moving to Oslo in 2020, for the Master in Art and Public Space at KHiO.

BURJ EL HAWA - TOWER OF THE WIND

Burj El Hawa was a large-scale intervention on Burj El Murr, an unfinished tower used by snipers during the Lebanese Civil War and left as a traumatic presence in Beirut’s skyline. I installed colorful curtains in hundreds of empty window openings. Moving with the wind, they transformed the rigid, war-scarred structure into a changing, choreographed image. The work neither erased the tower’s history nor proposed a permanent solution. It temporarily changed how the building was encountered, turning an accidental monument of war into an image associated with movement, domesticity and renewed life.

The intervention created an impossible appearance of habitation inside an empty and inaccessible structure. The textiles were inspired by outdoor curtains used in Beirut’s lower-income neighborhoods for privacy and protection from pollution.

Similar materials take on different meanings elsewhere: in Norway as awnings against the sun, and during the Syrian war as screens stretched between buildings to protect people from snipers. An ordinary material can operate as decoration, climatic device, social boundary or means of survival.

A series of pictures I took from inside the tower in this link

More links on the project:
https://artelagunaprize.com/jad-el-khoury-nuart-festival/
https://www.instituteforpublicart.org/case-studies/tower-of-the-wind/

Murr tower, Beirut Lebanon, 2018

Photo credit: Elie Abou Jaouhde

BURJ EL HAWA - DERIVABLE:
“Tower of the wind” derivable works are a series of commissions I got from different places in the world (Italy-France-Norway-Beirut), to activate contemporary ruins, cultural centers and museums. Each time the curtains got shaped in new sizes, mimicking a local/site specific urban fabric.

-National Museum, Beirut Lebanon, 2019