Hammer Projects: Marwa Arsanios at The Hammer Museum

Marwa Arsanios’s first exhibition in Los Angeles is a wide-ranging look into the mounting garbage crisis in Beirut and the city’s recent real estate boom.

Through architectural renderings and models, video, and topographical maps, a new project by artist Marwa Arsanios addresses the changing landscape of Beirut—a city marked by the increased development of its urban spaces and burdened by a mounting garbage crisis. Drawing a parallel between two distinct narratives in Beirut’s recent history, Arsanios’s research into this area takes aim at the aftermath of the neo-liberalist project that took shape at the beginning of the 1990s, in the years immediately following the end of Lebanese Civil War. Since summer 2015, after the closure of Naameh landfill in the mountains southeast of the city, thousands of tons of garbage have filled the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon, leading to widespread public outcry and accusations of government corruption. Although a surge in cultural institutions and art museums throughout the city have more recently sought to increase Beirut’s international profile alongside a boom in commercial real estate development, a number of building projects remain fallow and overflowing landfills threaten the health of the city’s population and environment. A new body of work by Arsanios speculates on these developments as part of an ongoing issue in Beirut’s history, while pointing to the greater political, social, and cultural implications in Lebanon more broadly.