Manal Abu-Shaheen

 

This work, whose title is the name of the city of Beirut, aims to show how the forms of communication of today's globalisation export idealised images of one culture to the realities of another. The West as the great coloniser imposing its lifestyle everywhere, its ideal of prosperity and society. The Tradition-Modernity dichotomy replicates the East-West dichotomy. Progress can only follow the traces of the capitalist world and the liberal system.

 

Motivated by the lack of a visual history of the landscape in Lebanon, the author constructs her own photographic archive of the urban environment: a city dominated by billboards. Advertising images of an opulent West fill the streets of a Middle Eastern city. Luxury, glamour and happiness. In a sense, the advertisements are the bait for the unlimited consumption of capitalist growth, but on the other hand, they aim to sell an entirely mythologised Western ideal that is incongruous in a post-war city.

 

Advertisements and neoliberal capitalism represent the latest form of colonialism. What is new and fascinating about this system is that it uses images as its most powerful tool. The city is now occupied by images of Western people and products. The fact that he uses black and white in his photographs seems to put the fictional world of advertising and the harsh reality of the city of Beirut on the same level.