Gregory Buchakjian
Gregory Buchakjian is an art historian and interdisciplinary visual artist. He lives and works in Beirut where he was born in 1971. PhD graduate at Sorbonne Université, he is director of the School of Visual Arts and Associate Professor at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA).
Buchakjian’s practice is based on narrative, archive and archeology. Investigating on urban turmoil, dereliction and heritage engendered his PhD dissertation, the subsequent book, Abandoned Dwellings, A History of Beirut (Beirut, Kaph Books: 2018, Valerie Cachard, ed.) and the solo exhibitions Abandoned Dwellings, Display of Systems (Beirut, Sursock Museum, 2018 curated by Karina El Helou) and Abandoned Dwellings of Beirut (Brussels, Villa Empain, 2019).
In 2018, he was showcased in the first national pavilion of Lebanon at the Venice Architecture Biennale and he contributed to the Works on Paper accompanying Karina El Helou's Cycles of Collapsing Progress exhibition in Oscar Nimeyer's Tripoli International Fair. In 2019 he conceived the installation Where do filmmakers go? for the 2nd Alba Cinema encounters, "Filming in Times of War", which he co-organized. In 2021, he created with Valérie Cachard and Sary Moussa the video Agenda 1979 at the invitation of the Opera National du Rhin, and the installation Hercules and Omphale for the exhibition How will it end? (Villa Empain, Brussels, in partnership with Centre Pompidou), based on a painting that was damaged by the blast of the 4th of August 2020 he attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi. In 2022, he premiered at Fotofocus Biennial Cincinnati his long-term Record of an Ordinary Life and intervened with Temporary art Platform in the Roman Temple of Hosn Niha.
Member of the advisory committee of the Saradar Collection, he took part in many juries including Sursock Museum Salon d’Automne (2009), Boghossian Prize (2012), Beirut Art Center’s Exposure (2013), Beirut Art Residency (2017) and Arab Documentary Photography Program (2019).
Address: Beirut, Lebanon
Buchakjian’s practice is based on narrative, archive and archeology. Investigating on urban turmoil, dereliction and heritage engendered his PhD dissertation, the subsequent book, Abandoned Dwellings, A History of Beirut (Beirut, Kaph Books: 2018, Valerie Cachard, ed.) and the solo exhibitions Abandoned Dwellings, Display of Systems (Beirut, Sursock Museum, 2018 curated by Karina El Helou) and Abandoned Dwellings of Beirut (Brussels, Villa Empain, 2019).
In 2018, he was showcased in the first national pavilion of Lebanon at the Venice Architecture Biennale and he contributed to the Works on Paper accompanying Karina El Helou's Cycles of Collapsing Progress exhibition in Oscar Nimeyer's Tripoli International Fair. In 2019 he conceived the installation Where do filmmakers go? for the 2nd Alba Cinema encounters, "Filming in Times of War", which he co-organized. In 2021, he created with Valérie Cachard and Sary Moussa the video Agenda 1979 at the invitation of the Opera National du Rhin, and the installation Hercules and Omphale for the exhibition How will it end? (Villa Empain, Brussels, in partnership with Centre Pompidou), based on a painting that was damaged by the blast of the 4th of August 2020 he attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi. In 2022, he premiered at Fotofocus Biennial Cincinnati his long-term Record of an Ordinary Life and intervened with Temporary art Platform in the Roman Temple of Hosn Niha.
Member of the advisory committee of the Saradar Collection, he took part in many juries including Sursock Museum Salon d’Automne (2009), Boghossian Prize (2012), Beirut Art Center’s Exposure (2013), Beirut Art Residency (2017) and Arab Documentary Photography Program (2019).
Address: Beirut, Lebanon
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Papers by Gregory Buchakjian
It is extracted from the long-term art and research project on Beirut’s abandoned dwellings by Gregory Buchakjian with the collaboration of Valérie Cachard. In one particular house, rescued documents disclosed the story of a former inhabitant, though providing contradictory information regarding her death.
“It offers lingering visitors luxurious furnished apartments with a lovely sea view, right in the middle of the best hotels. Under the same roof, anyone who chooses to do so can live, indulge in business, exercise a profession, get supplies, eat, drink and enjoy himself. A dream come true. In grim contrast to its publicity brochures, Beirut's 26-floor Holiday Inn last week was more a nightmare than a dream come true.”(1)
On March 21, 1976, after heavy shelling that started at night, squadrons from the “Mourabitoun”, the “Lebanese Arab Army” and other organizations captured the Holiday Inn. The high-rise hotel had been occupied by the Phalange when combats started in the hotels district in October 1975. On the following day, Christian militiamen struggled to take back their former citadel. A desperate attempt that revealed to be unsuccessful.
For the Lebanese Left and their Palestinians allies, the assault was a victory over “isolationist” and “imperialist” forces. At the contrary, the defeated Phalanges considered the event as an act of heroism of their isolated defenders. Last, the residents of Ain el Mraysseh neighborhood rejoiced of the end of the deadly sniping from the tower’s top floors.
The Holiday Inn attack is a milestone in the narratives of the Lebanese War. From the time of happening, it has been subject to various and contradictory versions and generated tales that incorporated collective memory and trauma. Based on archive, testimonies and artistic and literary works, this presentation doesn’t pretend to offer the definitive truth. It rather apprehends a specific historical moment and its interpretations through oral, written and visual approaches.
(1) Karsten Prager, "Beirut’s Agony Under the Guns of March", Time 107, no 14 (5 April 1976): 31.
Talks by Gregory Buchakjian
discussed from the art market's point of view, a historical perspective and in the presence of two artists distinguished for their radical aesthetical choices in response to the "narrative" in, on and from the Middle-East.
Durant la guerre de 1975-1990, des habitats sont investis par les combattants. Ils sont transformés en « permanences » et baraquements militaires, d’où les milices exercent une hégémonie partisane sur la population et font régner la terreur.
Publié dans des articles où il est même mis en rapport avec le Génocide arménien ou les émeutes de Gezi, ce cliché, plutôt le lieu qu’il représente, conserve une face obscure. Il a fallu des années d’investigation pour exhumer son histoire latente.
Books by Gregory Buchakjian
The aim is to bring attention back to Artemisia's artistic practice. Emphasising, in the analysis of her works, the artistic and iconographic innovations that Gentileschi introduced, freeing her figure from the definition of Caravaggista and the debt to her father figure.
The artist's personal and professional life, due to its peculiarities, has been the subject of privileged attention in recent decades, not only in art history and psychoanalysis, but also in literature and film, thanks to genre studies. Indeed, an increasing number of exhibitions, publications, novels and film productions have been dedicated to Gentileschi, especially since the 1980s. Often, however, these researches have contributed to spreading a stereotyped and incredibly reductive image of her artistic world, univocally read in the light of a biographical event that is certainly dramatic - the rape she suffered at the hands of Tassi - but artistically less relevant than many other incisive experiences, forgotten or almost unknown, that Gentileschi undertook in the parabola of her broad and full life, on which this volume seeks to shed light.
Her story has often been romanticised, if not even instrumentalised in a feminist key, in a discourse that undoubtedly found its raison d'être in the historical and social context in which it developed and that has allowed for a dutiful recuperation of the protagonists of art, but that has equally sadly flattened and defused the innovative charge of the painter's stylistic and iconographic language. The exceptional nature of her iconographic choices, as well as the chameleon-like nature of her style, borrowed yes from the stimuli of confrontation with her colleagues, but above all from a relentless research that results in a style in constant evolution, while preserving a key that is always personal and recognisable, must push us to shift our attention to the literary, scientific and musical interests and intellectual frequentations that the painter was incredibly able to cultivate in every city that recorded her passage.
The figure of Artemisia offers considerable points of fascination and interest, naturally also due to the gender component - her incredible excelling as a woman in a world of male colleagues. The aim of the publication, however, is to bring attention back to her artistic production, which was strongly influenced by the cultural circles she frequented as a protagonist, on a par with her male colleagues, rather than by the tragic and sadly well-known biographical event, which decreed her early departure from Rome.
The publication thus intends to shed light on the uniqueness of Artemisia's experience, often minimised in the thematic hat of women artists, demonstrating how instead her professional experience differs substantially from that of her colleagues Giovanna Garzoni, Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana and Fede Galizia, to whom she is united simply by virtue of the gender issue. Artemisia's production is not confined to genres traditionally intended for women who tried their hand at painting, such as still life and portraits: Gentileschi is also and above all a painter of history. Even her training, which was almost entirely self-taught, does not fit into the bourgeois education that the daughters of aristocratic painters used to receive.
Apart from the now famous trial, very little is still known about Artemisia's life. Certain time spans and movements are difficult to reconstruct and it has not yet been possible to draw up a catalogue of her works that is widely accepted by critics. Of the paintings that the sources tell us about, many are still unrecognised or probably lost. The antiques market and auction houses are increasingly bringing to the surface specimens attributed to the artist. The style of which, characterised by a certain varietas, allows for considerable attributional fluctuations.
It was therefore decided to develop the narrative by following the few chronological and geographical fixed points of Artemisia's artistic biography, tracing her production from the first years of her training in Rome, through the success she achieved in Florence, the still largely obscure but certainly relevant Venetian parentheses, up to the moment of her greatest artistic success, her stay in Naples. It was in fact in the Neapolitan city that Artemisia achieved consecration as a great protagonist of the European Baroque.
The aim of the volume is also to question the centrality of the figure of her father Orazio in Artemisia's artistic growth. As well as that of restoring dignity to the professional figure of Gentileschi, who was skilfully able to move independently and with great success in what today we would call the art system. Despite the fact that her strong ambition never allowed her to feel satisfied, Artemisia managed to get herself engaged by the major national and international patrons of the time.
The publishing project aims to re-establish a narrative that is as authentic as possible, close to what the sources themselves and above all her artworks suggest to us: Artemisia was a protagonist of the culture of the period, who was on an equal footing with the likes of Galileo Galilei, her affectionate friend, Ferdinando de’ Medici, Gentileschi's first important patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Michelangelo Buonarroti Junior and many other protagonists of the contemporary elite. After working for the major Italian and European courts until her maturity, Gentileschi also set up her own workshop, the first ever among female artists, which was to set an inescapable precedent for future colleagues.
A final section of the book is devoted to a selection of her letters, which provide a clear insight into the status that the painter had built up over the course of her career. Artemisia wrote directly, without many frills and with a certain insistence to the most powerful artists of the period, to whom she sent test works and gifts in order to be hired. She does not take no for an answer and does not want to know about haggling over the prices of her works. Although aware of her natural condition of inferiority, she is determined to ensure that this does not affect her artistic career. The picture that emerges from the documents and sources contemporary with her, and which this volume sets out to re-establish, is very different from the one painted by much of modern criticism and established in public opinion. Artemisia is not the defenceless and frightened victim, who tries to overcome her biographical trauma through artistic catharsis, but rather a tireless, determined, proud and self-confident professional and her art, with which she surpasses tradition, challenging its greatest exponents.
Pp. 37-144
Cet ensemble constitue un témoignage remarquable pour l’histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain. Il permet de suivre le mouvement des galeries, celles qui ouvrent, celles qui déménagent, celles qui ferment ainsi que celui des artistes. Les noms de Shafic Abboud, Paul Guiragossian, les frères Basbous, Amine el Bacha et Hussein Madi côtoient ainsi ceux de peintres et sculpteurs tombés dans l’oubli. En tant qu’objets, les affiches permettent également de suivre une évolution dans les esthétiques et les styles graphiques et typographiques.
En mars 2001, l’Université Américaine de Beyrouth – AUB présentait une exposition intitulée Art Posters in Lebanon, couvrant la période des années 1960 au années 1990. Les 177 affiches prêtées par des galeristes et collectionneurs furent par la suite données à l’université et Cesar Nammour rédigea une présentation de ce fonds. La présente exposition se concentre sur les années de la guerre de 1975-1990. Ce choix est avant tout motivé par une volonté de rappeler la richesse de l’activité culturelle pendant ces années difficiles, à un moment où le Liban est à nouveau plongé dans une crise profonde qui elle non plus n’est pas venue à bout de la scène artistique.
It is extracted from the long-term art and research project on Beirut’s abandoned dwellings by Gregory Buchakjian with the collaboration of Valérie Cachard. In one particular house, rescued documents disclosed the story of a former inhabitant, though providing contradictory information regarding her death.
“It offers lingering visitors luxurious furnished apartments with a lovely sea view, right in the middle of the best hotels. Under the same roof, anyone who chooses to do so can live, indulge in business, exercise a profession, get supplies, eat, drink and enjoy himself. A dream come true. In grim contrast to its publicity brochures, Beirut's 26-floor Holiday Inn last week was more a nightmare than a dream come true.”(1)
On March 21, 1976, after heavy shelling that started at night, squadrons from the “Mourabitoun”, the “Lebanese Arab Army” and other organizations captured the Holiday Inn. The high-rise hotel had been occupied by the Phalange when combats started in the hotels district in October 1975. On the following day, Christian militiamen struggled to take back their former citadel. A desperate attempt that revealed to be unsuccessful.
For the Lebanese Left and their Palestinians allies, the assault was a victory over “isolationist” and “imperialist” forces. At the contrary, the defeated Phalanges considered the event as an act of heroism of their isolated defenders. Last, the residents of Ain el Mraysseh neighborhood rejoiced of the end of the deadly sniping from the tower’s top floors.
The Holiday Inn attack is a milestone in the narratives of the Lebanese War. From the time of happening, it has been subject to various and contradictory versions and generated tales that incorporated collective memory and trauma. Based on archive, testimonies and artistic and literary works, this presentation doesn’t pretend to offer the definitive truth. It rather apprehends a specific historical moment and its interpretations through oral, written and visual approaches.
(1) Karsten Prager, "Beirut’s Agony Under the Guns of March", Time 107, no 14 (5 April 1976): 31.
discussed from the art market's point of view, a historical perspective and in the presence of two artists distinguished for their radical aesthetical choices in response to the "narrative" in, on and from the Middle-East.
Durant la guerre de 1975-1990, des habitats sont investis par les combattants. Ils sont transformés en « permanences » et baraquements militaires, d’où les milices exercent une hégémonie partisane sur la population et font régner la terreur.
Publié dans des articles où il est même mis en rapport avec le Génocide arménien ou les émeutes de Gezi, ce cliché, plutôt le lieu qu’il représente, conserve une face obscure. Il a fallu des années d’investigation pour exhumer son histoire latente.
The aim is to bring attention back to Artemisia's artistic practice. Emphasising, in the analysis of her works, the artistic and iconographic innovations that Gentileschi introduced, freeing her figure from the definition of Caravaggista and the debt to her father figure.
The artist's personal and professional life, due to its peculiarities, has been the subject of privileged attention in recent decades, not only in art history and psychoanalysis, but also in literature and film, thanks to genre studies. Indeed, an increasing number of exhibitions, publications, novels and film productions have been dedicated to Gentileschi, especially since the 1980s. Often, however, these researches have contributed to spreading a stereotyped and incredibly reductive image of her artistic world, univocally read in the light of a biographical event that is certainly dramatic - the rape she suffered at the hands of Tassi - but artistically less relevant than many other incisive experiences, forgotten or almost unknown, that Gentileschi undertook in the parabola of her broad and full life, on which this volume seeks to shed light.
Her story has often been romanticised, if not even instrumentalised in a feminist key, in a discourse that undoubtedly found its raison d'être in the historical and social context in which it developed and that has allowed for a dutiful recuperation of the protagonists of art, but that has equally sadly flattened and defused the innovative charge of the painter's stylistic and iconographic language. The exceptional nature of her iconographic choices, as well as the chameleon-like nature of her style, borrowed yes from the stimuli of confrontation with her colleagues, but above all from a relentless research that results in a style in constant evolution, while preserving a key that is always personal and recognisable, must push us to shift our attention to the literary, scientific and musical interests and intellectual frequentations that the painter was incredibly able to cultivate in every city that recorded her passage.
The figure of Artemisia offers considerable points of fascination and interest, naturally also due to the gender component - her incredible excelling as a woman in a world of male colleagues. The aim of the publication, however, is to bring attention back to her artistic production, which was strongly influenced by the cultural circles she frequented as a protagonist, on a par with her male colleagues, rather than by the tragic and sadly well-known biographical event, which decreed her early departure from Rome.
The publication thus intends to shed light on the uniqueness of Artemisia's experience, often minimised in the thematic hat of women artists, demonstrating how instead her professional experience differs substantially from that of her colleagues Giovanna Garzoni, Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana and Fede Galizia, to whom she is united simply by virtue of the gender issue. Artemisia's production is not confined to genres traditionally intended for women who tried their hand at painting, such as still life and portraits: Gentileschi is also and above all a painter of history. Even her training, which was almost entirely self-taught, does not fit into the bourgeois education that the daughters of aristocratic painters used to receive.
Apart from the now famous trial, very little is still known about Artemisia's life. Certain time spans and movements are difficult to reconstruct and it has not yet been possible to draw up a catalogue of her works that is widely accepted by critics. Of the paintings that the sources tell us about, many are still unrecognised or probably lost. The antiques market and auction houses are increasingly bringing to the surface specimens attributed to the artist. The style of which, characterised by a certain varietas, allows for considerable attributional fluctuations.
It was therefore decided to develop the narrative by following the few chronological and geographical fixed points of Artemisia's artistic biography, tracing her production from the first years of her training in Rome, through the success she achieved in Florence, the still largely obscure but certainly relevant Venetian parentheses, up to the moment of her greatest artistic success, her stay in Naples. It was in fact in the Neapolitan city that Artemisia achieved consecration as a great protagonist of the European Baroque.
The aim of the volume is also to question the centrality of the figure of her father Orazio in Artemisia's artistic growth. As well as that of restoring dignity to the professional figure of Gentileschi, who was skilfully able to move independently and with great success in what today we would call the art system. Despite the fact that her strong ambition never allowed her to feel satisfied, Artemisia managed to get herself engaged by the major national and international patrons of the time.
The publishing project aims to re-establish a narrative that is as authentic as possible, close to what the sources themselves and above all her artworks suggest to us: Artemisia was a protagonist of the culture of the period, who was on an equal footing with the likes of Galileo Galilei, her affectionate friend, Ferdinando de’ Medici, Gentileschi's first important patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Michelangelo Buonarroti Junior and many other protagonists of the contemporary elite. After working for the major Italian and European courts until her maturity, Gentileschi also set up her own workshop, the first ever among female artists, which was to set an inescapable precedent for future colleagues.
A final section of the book is devoted to a selection of her letters, which provide a clear insight into the status that the painter had built up over the course of her career. Artemisia wrote directly, without many frills and with a certain insistence to the most powerful artists of the period, to whom she sent test works and gifts in order to be hired. She does not take no for an answer and does not want to know about haggling over the prices of her works. Although aware of her natural condition of inferiority, she is determined to ensure that this does not affect her artistic career. The picture that emerges from the documents and sources contemporary with her, and which this volume sets out to re-establish, is very different from the one painted by much of modern criticism and established in public opinion. Artemisia is not the defenceless and frightened victim, who tries to overcome her biographical trauma through artistic catharsis, but rather a tireless, determined, proud and self-confident professional and her art, with which she surpasses tradition, challenging its greatest exponents.
Pp. 37-144
Cet ensemble constitue un témoignage remarquable pour l’histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain. Il permet de suivre le mouvement des galeries, celles qui ouvrent, celles qui déménagent, celles qui ferment ainsi que celui des artistes. Les noms de Shafic Abboud, Paul Guiragossian, les frères Basbous, Amine el Bacha et Hussein Madi côtoient ainsi ceux de peintres et sculpteurs tombés dans l’oubli. En tant qu’objets, les affiches permettent également de suivre une évolution dans les esthétiques et les styles graphiques et typographiques.
En mars 2001, l’Université Américaine de Beyrouth – AUB présentait une exposition intitulée Art Posters in Lebanon, couvrant la période des années 1960 au années 1990. Les 177 affiches prêtées par des galeristes et collectionneurs furent par la suite données à l’université et Cesar Nammour rédigea une présentation de ce fonds. La présente exposition se concentre sur les années de la guerre de 1975-1990. Ce choix est avant tout motivé par une volonté de rappeler la richesse de l’activité culturelle pendant ces années difficiles, à un moment où le Liban est à nouveau plongé dans une crise profonde qui elle non plus n’est pas venue à bout de la scène artistique.
This paper proposes to read Beirut My City and A Suspended Life as a diptych. The first, a documentary, is a prequel of the second, which is a fiction. The second, which was produced in a period of lull, includes war rushes from the first. Both pieces take an abandoned house as a point of departure and deploy into the urban territory of West Beirut. Thus the city appears as an enclosed zone – corresponding to the French term “huis clos” – like the stage of a tragic theatre play. Death is omnipresent, from the graphic images of corpses in Beirut My City to the killing of Karim, a real person in the same film who transmutes into the major male character of A Suspended Life. Saab counterbalances the macabre with Fellinian street scenes in Beirut My City over which Roger Assaf’s voice-over enlightens life in the besieged city as a possible utopia while A Suspended Life plot is an improbable and non-politically correct love story in the middle of devastation.
Besides their existence as acts of resistance and invaluable documents for a critical period, these films question the relation between life, death and the image and the cadaver, three decades after Blanchot’s relections in The Space of Litterature.