20 SQUARE METERS
20 m2: installation with 50 clay sculptures
64 Objects: 64 silk screens
Yammine’s installation consists of three elements, 20 m2, 64 Objects and Lies. The video,
Lies, presents a series of individuals that discuss their memories of communal life in a cellar
during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). The video is accompanied by drawings and miniature
clay sculptures. At first glance, the ensemble produces an uncanny emptiness. Upon
closer inspection, the drawings and raw clay miniature sculptures are naive reproductions
of a various banal every- day domestic objects.
The sketches were originally made by a group of about 20 members of the artist’s extended
family, who shared a cellar of about 20 square meters for 15 years during the Lebanese civil
war. In 2016, 26 years after the end of the war, Yammine asked her relatives to recall this
period, and record their memories of those past times in a series of drawings of the objects
they shared in the cellar.
The artist has preserved the imperfections of the original drawings of objects. She views this
as a sign of the alteration of the memory, that may be caused by time or by trauma. The
insubstantial form and scale of her raw clay sculptures makes them fragile and precarious. Even
though the installation doesn’t speak directly about war; it’s constituent elements suggest an
insecure atmosphere, and vestiges of a distant war that still haunts Lebanon today.
Yammine explains:
Objects are not just a part of our everyday life, they are here with every gesture, at all times.
The continual use of objects or the fact that we are accustomed to see them in the same place
at all times, makes us forget about their existence when they are not being used. But they
are still there. In times of conflict and trouble, the same objects acquire new roles and new
significations. We think and remember them in new ways. And they hold stories and histories
within them. In this installation, objects and stories of the simple life of a community, hold
within them the bigger history of a country.
Wendy Gers, curator, researcher
