Marwan Rechmaoui • Municipalities

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 mimics and behaves erratically and formally all at once.  A self declared autonomous structure within an existing reality, Municipalities contemplates processes of lived reality and the loss of sense of time, or frozen time, that we experience when we attempt to withdraw and build worlds that offer other insights and realizations.

The spatial intervention in BAC’s central hall, is accompanied by a series of four commissioned music compositions that will be performed live and then installed consecutively within the structure for a period of time each.

Open for interpretation of use, Municipalities will host different types of activities throughout its 6 months installation period including moments of reflection and much needed respite.

This commission has been made possible with the support of Rafi Manoukian.