Amanda Sarroff for the Jan Van Ecyk Academie’s Open Studios 2020

For Marwan Moujaes, landscape and mourning are linked inextricably. In his words, the work of mourning is not merely contemplative but a fluid constellation of tensions and forces acting toward the body and mind’s assimilation of loss. Nature too is a complex and ever mutable dynamic existing below the surface of given language. Landscapes become sites of our perceived or projected memories, histories, politics, and grief. Teasing out Giorgio Agamben’s concept of l’inappropriable, Moujaes views nature as a confrontation with that which is forever beyond our grasp or apprehension. Just as in mourning, nature leaves us in a state of perpetual want or loss. A state we experience as immense poverty.

Moujaes’ graceful and tentative gestures attempt to give voice to the ineffable and “make use of this poverty.” In I brought you candies, because flowers are perishable (2016) he secretly installed a beehive within Beirut’s walled-off Jewish cemetery. The honey he harvested was distributed in the form of candies to those who will never enter, let alone bear witness to, this forbidden garden. Moujaes actions are often predicated on trespass. For his video Do not stare at me, because I am darkened by the sun (2017) he posed as a wedding photographer in order to film the Lebanese Israeli border. In yet another ongoing series titled Bird’s Flight Is Suspended between 9am and 5pm (one iteration took place Maastricht in 2018) Moujaes installed banners forbidding birds to fly during prescribed hours. The banners are based on signs raised in Lebanese municipalities banning Syrian refugees from entering public space at certain times. Moujaes’ encroachments into the territory of loss and mourning are accompanied by transgressions into proscribed landscapes both real and imagined.