Dangerous Gifts: Lamia Joreige's Objects of War

Abstract

Lamia Joreige's Objects of War is in a sense a redundant artwork, since virtually everything in Lebanon is already an object of war. Properly questioned, almost any object will reveal its perspective on Lebanon's history from the beginning of the civil war in 1975 to the present. Objects are monads that way, highly curved lenses that can perceive the entire universe from their very particular point of view. Every brick and tree and plastic jug and sound recording in Lebanon, and of course the dust into which some of these things have been ground over time, has a perspective on the history of the war. In short, posing questions to any material object, whether through radiography, spectrometry, or asking somebody what she knows about it, will cause it to give up certain of its histories. There are not too few war stories but too many stories— repressed, willfully forgotten, or remembered with fierce selectivity.