Ziad Antar works in both France and Lebanon and spent his childhood in southern Lebanon, where he witnessed the misery of the Lebanese Civil War. Although the issues he addresses in his work tend toward the controversial, Antar maintains a rather cool and objective attitude, offering the audience the opportunity to interpret and judge the subject from its own point of view.
Terres de Pomme de Terre, shot around a potato farm in Lebanon, features a strange and ambiguous space that vacillates between the impersonal commercialism of the global economy and the intimacy of artisanal pride, shown through the awkward behavior of the people who live there. Taking the format of educational films or photographs, this work is reminiscent of the incorporation of social realism into the agriculturalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Beirut Bereft is a collaborative project of Antar and Rasha Salti, a curator and freelance writer. It consists of Antar’s series of photographs of forsaken architecture in Beirut and a publication containing Antar’s photographs and Salti’s text. Built between the 1970s and the 1990s and left unfinished due to the civil war, these buildings were used as temporary residences by militias during the war. They remain abandoned to this day, bearing vivid vestiges of the civil war.
