Title: Better be watching the clouds
Attributed date: 1992
Attributed to: Fadwa Hassoun
Production date: 2017

The following plates were donated in 1992 to The Atlas Group by Fadwa Hassoun, a retired officer in the Lebanese Army. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Lebanon’s Deuxième Bureau code-named local and international political and military leaders in the language of local flora. As a trained botanist, Hassoun’s job was to assign the code names to the leaders. Hassoun kept track of all code names in a logbook where she collaged faces of the leaders onto flowers and trees. The plant’s name became the politician’s code name. As such, Hosni Mubarak became Dwarf Mallow; Mikhail Gorbachev, Purple Carline; Ronald Reagan, Kermes Oak; And Kamal Joumblatt, Pink Sorrell.

Title:  We are a fair people. We never speak well of one another
Attributed date: 1994
Attributed to: Anonymous
Production date: 2014

The following photographs were donated to The Atlas Group in 1994. The anonymous donation was accompanied by the following statement: 

​I always wondered why my father feared the land as he did. Family excursions to the mountains or ancient sites left him shaken and pale. An avid photographer, he photographed our outings and would spend hours alone in his workshop, hunched over his slides with tweezers and a magnifying glass, consumed by what he was seeing or doing. I recently and finally managed to see the slides in question. It goes without saying that my father was clearly seeing things.