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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

“The plants are the primordial soup of the Earth that allows matter to become life and life to retransform itself into ‘brute matter.’ We call ‘atmosphere’ this radical mixture that makes everything coexist in a single place without sacrificing either forms or substances.” Emanuele Coccia: The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture.

Since 1997, Steiner & Lenzlinger have been developing site-specific installations that carry deep social and environmental concerns. Responding to the current ecological crisis in Lebanon, they present their exhibition les extrémités de notre univers at our Beirut space.

Steiner & Lenzlinger create installations that blur the lines between fantasy and reality; using both natural and artificial elements specific to their discourse.

While visiting Lebanon, they collected waste, as well as plants, combined to create what feels like an enchanted forest in which visitors can get lost.

Around the gallery in the Quarantine district and on the beaches of Beirut, Steiner & Lenzlinger had no difficulty finding garbage which becomes almost poetic in the context of their installation. Plants were carefully selected, conveying the unheard voices of ecological causes in Lebanon.

Additionally, a collection of seeds is presented, gathered from Terbol, Lebanon through the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Arid Areas (ICARDA), whose mission is to preserve and develop agricultural capital in Africa and Asia. The Bisri Valley in South Lebanon, and the dam project that will flood several hectares of land and plants, was also a source of inspiration for the artists.

The exhibition highlights a crude reality, which visitors encounter through the lens of the duo's ephemeral and hybrid universe.

The surreal fantasy they create transports the viewer into a fabricated magical world, that cheerfully mixes organic elements and chemical fertilizer on which the installation will feed to grow and morph throughout the exhibition.