"When I screamed
When I was confused
How did you find me?
Find me behind the seven walls
That I built around me?"
-Zelda
In 'Missing', a solo exhibition by Iraqi artist Salam Omar, the artist attempts to narrate the thin trajectory of a projectile; mapping out a territory which is not clear enough to become a map. An impossible territory grows here out of architectural sites but this territory is not a cartography; in this political anatomy, the viewer is confronted with the physical space of violence which is neither abstract nor impersonal. How to look at things exactly as they are? How to speak without metaphor? Omar's work whispers into the viewer with the cold breath of a nameless death which contains no miracle or redemption; it is an escape from being, not a destination. A building rose out of nowhere; not as an architectural structure but as a memory of the war.
This ghostly presence, once the symbol of a city camouflaged as united, revealed itself deeply divided: Years of fighting added architectural layers through which souls were inspected by the mire of an invisible shooter. Hidden behind these walls, layer by layer, the lone sniper remained an allegory for absence: The absent victims that never returned home, the absent peace that never arrived, the absent fighter without voice and without face. Each day, he would return to the Barakat building, behind sand bags and graffiti, and through the small incisions in the wall, gaze into the whole of Beirut: Tiles piled in a corner, the memory of a glorious past, and the glory of ruthless killing. The warning of Nietzsche is crystal clear here: When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.
Arie Amaya-Akkermans