Lily Abichahine

Lily Abichahine is an artist based between Beirut and Paris. She has been exploring a range of mediums: performance, lecture performance, video and installation as a way of addressing major questions of interest. Among them, the role of body - alive or dead - Greek mythology, Mediterranean realities, migration, urban memory, family transmission, legal questionings, thanatology.

Our Sea II: Secrets of the Infinite Sea
2022
Lecture Performance
Theater Bremen | Bremen | GermanyDirector, Writer, and Performer: Lily Abichahine
Video Editors: Rami El-Sabbagh, Rabih Ghannam
Docu-Essay Editor: Firas El-Hallak
Directors of Photography: François Duverger, Barıs B. Atal
Camera Assistants: Valentin Printant, Fatemeh Melika Gholizadeh, Yalçın Inan
Sound Artist: Jad AtouiSecrets of the Infinite Sea is the second chapter within a series of myths and reality explorations. After two residencies in Izmir and Marseille, the artist traces a connection between these cities, reminding us of invisible links among various Mediterranean contexts. Exploring both reality and mythology, she tackles the myth of Prometheus. In this work, she transforms herself into a contemporary haruspex and tells the story of migration from ancient to contemporary times, offering to her audience a reading of the future that mixes facts with dark humor, in text, video and sound.Promotional Docu-Essay (for video access, kindly contact via e-mail to have the password)
Goethe-Institut | Our Sea II: Secrets of the Infinite Sea, 2022

Abjad Hawwaz: How I Was Destroyed by a Mall Thrice
2022
Installation
Beit Beirut | Beirut | LebanonConcept, Design and Text: Lily Abichahine
Project Assistants: Nour Abdelbaki, Soraya Salwan Hammoud
Mechanical Engineering Consultant: Ali Kain, Tilman Grünewald
Sound Engineer: Ziad Moukarzel
Technician: Mohammad Abou KhalafFor her first installation, the artist worked on the topic of the urban memory. Starting from a personal story about her childhood school that ceased to exist as it became a commercial center, she tries to recreate the playground of the forgotten school. To do so, she installs a sandpit of 2m x 1m, which is mechanically shaped with structures-sculptures that appear and disappear continuously and which relates to the aesthetics of a construction site. She also resorts to recordings at various stations where testimonies of alumni, staff, neighbors and people who remember the old plot of land are replayed. Symbol of a city that is in continuous construction and deconstruction, the preservation of memory is achieved through the archiving of oral history and the physical reconstruction of one of the main school elements.Video of the sandpit in motion (for video access, kindly contact via e-mail to have the password)
Allo Beirut? | Abjad Hawwaz: how I was Destroyed by a Mall Thrice, 2022

Extended Cities
2021
Installation
The Muse | Sudan | Work in progressConcept, design and text: Lily Abichahine, in conversation with Hazem Al-Muhammad
Project assistant: Marwan Hamza
Researcher assistant: Hassan NasserExtended Cities is an art residency between Sudan and Lebanon through which the artist will explore the city of Khartoum, transposing her Lebanese experience relating to the study of places that cease to exist. The work proposed delves into the memories of each city drawing comparisons to understand each through the other’s lens. The project relies on defining the themes through which we can understand their social, economic and political intersections. These are interpreted through an artistic intervention resulting from Abichahine’s dialogue with Sudanese artist Hazem Hussein.

L’Étreinte
2022
Lecture-Performance
Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique | Paris | FranceWriter and Performer: Lily Abichahine
With the generous guidance of Giuseppe BurighelThe artist conducted a happening within a symposium program at the prestigious Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique (CNSAD) in Paris. She offered her audience an experience of circumstantial taboos where touch is at the heart of experimentation. Her intervention was followed by a lecture where she juggles between narrative-fiction and emerging legal questions in a world torn between two imperatives: freedom on one hand and security on the other hand.

Exquisite Corpse
2021
Lecture Performance
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm | Frankfurt | GermanyWriter, and Performer: Lily Abichahine
Assistant Researchers: Rola Makké, Lauren Hutchinson
Graphic Designer: Ghalia Khalili
Artistic Advisor: Rabih Mroueh
With the generous guidance of Matthias LilienthalWho decides on life after death? In Exquisite Corpse Lily Abichahine tells the story of one Lebanese family: after the father’s death his son decides to have the body mummified to allow future generations to have contact with him. Is this a sign of affection or a liability? An almost irresolvable dispute develops between different members of the family which Abichahine describes from the perspective of the lawyer of the family. Entirely in keeping with the motto ‘the personal is political’, the microcosm of this family story provides interesting insights into Lebanese society. Where art meets the law different political and ethical approaches come into play, as does the question: on what temporal, spatial and emotional levels are the effects of the patriarchy felt?

Our Sea I: Choreography for a Woman and a Stone
2021
Performance
Santa Maria dello Spasimo | Palermo | ItalyDirector, Writer, and Performer: Lily Abichahine
Video Editor: Rami El-Sabbagh
Video Assistants: Micheal Landau, Riccardo Campagna
Director of Photography: Genny Petrotta
Sound Artist: Jad Atoui
Opera Singer: Eliane Saadeh
Production Manager: Letizia GulloWithin the framework project Our Sea/Mare Nostrum, which aims to focus on the illegalities of the coastal areas of several cities across the Mediterranean, and following two residencies in Lebanon and Sicily, a first performance was premiered in 2021. Choreography for a Woman and a Stone is a reinterpretation of the myth of Sisyphus: Sisyphus is a woman, she comes from the region which surrounds this “middle basin”, and she leads a circular run that lasts approximately 40 min, tied by a rope to a stone placed in the center of an 8 by 8 meters’ stage. Her run leaves traces on the ground and behind her a screen projects a video, fruit of filming in the two localities.Excerpts from performance (for video access, kindly contact via e-mail to have the password)
Santa Maria dello Spasimo | Our Sea I: Choreography for a Woman and a Stone, 2021

Agreement for Photography Provision
2021
Collective Exhibition
Colonels Row | New York | United StatesConcept and Drafting: Lily Abichahine
Assistant Researchers: Tala Rahal, Tamar Kharatishvlii
Curators: Mari Spirto, Lila Nazemian, Abhijan Toto
Advisors: Vartan Avakian, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Kristine KhouriThe exhibited, reviewed, and annotated agreement is based on the Deposit Agreement used by the Arab Image Foundation (AIF). Alongside it, a photograph of the AIF collection serving as a guiding tool is displayed. The viewer is invited to participate in the investigation of ethics and legal considerations in the context of digitized sensitive archival material. Through the medium of a legal document, the lawyer and artist explores how one might address the preservation of their cultural heritage. Questions of rightful ownership, custodianship, control over culture and data are examined throughout the project. The show itself explores histories of forced migration, memory, and material culture following the New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies workshop Unravelling Collections and Practices: Rights, Materialities and Photographic Agency.