Rayyane Tabet - The Return
RAYYANE TABET
The Return
May 4 – August 16, 2023
beirut
The Return press text
The exhibition investigates the journey of a marble sculpture, dated ca. 360 B.C. that was unearthed during the excavation of the temple of Eshmun in Saida in July 1967. A month earlier, in June of that same year, the Arab-Israeli war had impacted the whole Middle East, and its reverberations are still felt today.
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It unfolds through 8 chapters, in a chronological loop that reconstructs the Bull’s Head journey. The artist pieces the story back together from photographs, excavation inventories, police reports, sales invoices, shipping documents, loan agreements, customs declarations, magazines, emails, and court papers presented to The Supreme Court of New York as part of a series of investigations that took place between 2017 and 2021. The sculpture has been since restituted to Lebanon and while it is today on display at the National Museum in Beirut, its 8 photographs, enlarged to cover whole walls, are presented in the gallery. The installation highlights the past and afterlives of the object and summarizes fifty years of a story that is partially obscured by the general amnesty issued at the end of the Lebanese civil war.