Beirut Bereft: The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict

Artist Statement

All photographs were taken between 2007 & 2009.
To the image of its political, social and cultural scapes, Beirut’s urban landscape still bears markers,scars and vestiges of its seventeen-year long civil war, more than fifteen years after the cessation of violence. Peppered through the city’s fabric are buildings, unfinished, often in their bare concrete shell. Tucked between 'functional' buildings they are cast out from attention and have slipped from visibility. Built in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, throughout the interrupted chapters of the war, they were used during the war by militia fighters as temporary ‘encampments’, rooms were furnished with basic materiel to accommodate for sleep and meals, higher floors and rooftops were used for sniping, facades and windows of lower floors were buttressed with sandbags. These unfinished buildings morphed into encampments and became strategic landmarks in the battles between militia groups seeking to expand their control. When the violence was halted and negotiations for the post-war accord negotiated, the fighters packed up and emptied the buildings. Their status as ‘landmarks’ was suddenly arrested, and they once again became the failed, unresolved projects imbricated within a bustling urban fabric. Today, these bare-faced concrete edifices, sometimes guarded by rusted fences, stand bereft, at once encasing sorrow, destitution and abandonment, surly evidence of failures, nagging reminders of what is systematically cast away from sight, representation and narrative.

Rasha Salti


This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 9