As I was visiting The Tate Gallery in London in November last year, Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an exhibition" came to my mind. I was with Ricardo, the son of an old friend of mine, who was so kind as to guide me through London and of course The Tate. During the visit, the idea of working on a paraphrase of the music by Modest Mussorgsky started to grow but instead of having pictures as inspiration I focused on a visitor going through the gallery. I started to take pictures, with my cellphone, of my young friend looking at different pieces of art.
The only photo that I took, of an actual work of art at the gallery, was a fragment of "Monument for the living" (2001-2018) by the Lebanese artist Merwan Rechmaoui. The piece was a three-dimensional rectangle with the widest sides like grids in cement allowing you to see people through it. The sculpture is a scaled copy of Murj al Murr, a well-known building in Beirut, Lebanon. The construction of the building started in 1974 and was supposed to be the highest in the country. Unfortunately, the construction was halted a year after when the civil war broke out. At the end of the war, in 1990, the building could not be repaired and was left to its fate.
I came to call the project Promenade through a Gallery. The images show a regular visitor looking with interest at the pieces of art exhibited at the gallery. Some times he stays for a long time and other times he just passes by. When I went through the pictures I had taken I thought of working with the picture of Rechmaoui's sculpture and the pictures of Ricardo.
My picture of the sculpture became a fragment of a large weave of threads, where each thread is a fragment of life. You build your life by weaving together different threads, and you look at life through them. The result was 14 images.
This project has four parts: The first part is the work I made with the photos I took at the gallery. The second part is a video in which I mix Mussorgsky's, music brilliant interpreted by Evgeny Kissin (a record I downloaded from Youtube), and my photos following the music. The third part is a portrait of my young friend. Finally, the fourth part is this site. |
