Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon

Abstract

Posthumous Images hinges its scholarly contribution on illustrating the ‘communitiesof witnessing’inpost-civilwarLebanonandskepticismtowardclaims of representation (pp. 10–11). The Lebanese artists that Chad Elias examines belong to the war generation (jilal-harb), which includesWalid Raad, founder of the ‘Atlas Group’, and some of his collaborators, such as Bernard Khoury. This generation has articulated their aesthetic sensibilities by drawing on the photographs, buildings, materials and memories around them. Five chapters, accompaniedbystillsandimages, dividethebook, whichisunitedbytherecurring trope that the past cannot be represented in the elusive task of recording it. State-sanctioned amnesia in Lebanon with regard to the civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990 is premised on the formula of no victor, no vanquished (la ghalib la maghlub); this amnesia was formalized in the 1991 amnesty law (pp. 7 …