Shuruq Harb · Ghost at the Feast

Ghost at the Feast brings together five major works conceived by Shuruq Harb over the past ten years. In her practice, Harb looks peripherally at the dispossession and oppression faced by Palestinians, tracking the kinds of dreams, hallucinations, psychological symptoms, and impulses their brutality and fragmentation creates. Harb’s vastly interdisciplinary work emerges from a restless effort to create a portrait of her native Ramallah through its ephemeral inventories of ever-changing street signage and popular imagery circulating between city facades, shop windows, and virtual clouds. Faces and names of strangers, signifiers of another time and place, other peoples’ stories and souvenirs… all have become her way of claiming her own memory and politics of location. In continuous correspondence and conversation with the Beirut Art Center team, Harb has proposed new and existing iterations of her works, two of which were produced in Lebanon for the show. Together we have conceived an exhibition filtered through layers of estrangement and familiarity. Exploring how the visual indexes of one place could resonate in another where neither she nor her works can travel, what emerges is an uncannily common terrain that links our two cities and their respective struggles: a profound sense of loss and a culture that comes out of and resists duress. Among other things, the exhibition poses the question of how works made from and for Palestine can take on the ability to conjure the dead in Lebanon.

Production Team
Technical Director: Nadim Deaibes
Technical Team: Rawad Kanj . Salim Abou Ayash . Ehab Zaheredeen
Translation: Ziad Chakaroun . Hussein Nassereddine
Graphic Design: Farah El Samman
Printing: Al-Matba’a Printing
Carpentry – Installation: Georges Moussalli
AV Maintenance: Fadi Awad
Electrical Works: Eng. Fadi Gharib . Abed El Aziz Khnayfes . Ahmad Khnayfes
Construction: Khaled Awad . Elias Awad . Milad Chahine . Tony Chahine
Metalwork: Taleb El Saj
Painting: Louay Abdel Haq . Souheil Salouh
Transportation: Charbel El Helou
Maintenance: Ara Giragossian
Inflatable Fabrication: Flyaway Inflatables
Production Support: Nabil Zeitoun

Special Thanks
Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research . Al-Harah Theater Mohammad and Mahera Abu Ghazaleh Foundation (MMAG) . Sursock Museum . Salem Khurayezet . Adel Khoury . Ziad Moukarzel . Elie Issa Trad . Rita Giragossian . Pamela Giragossian