The Lebanese Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale illustrates the perpetual action of the human imagination on the reality of the world. In the exhibition The World in the Image of Man, fiction inspires and nourishes our daily lives. Ayman Baalbaki will be presenting an installation titled Janus Gate.
Speaking about his work, Ayman Baalbaki says: “My starting point was Beirut, which I see as a city rich in what Michel Foucault refers to as ‘other spaces.’ Along the model of the word ‘Lebanonisation,’ meant to describe the fragmentation of a state, ‘Beirutisation’ defines places troubled by barricades and borders – in other words, to speak of the urban dismemberment of a city and its fragmentation into discrete islands. I then thought of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who looks both to the inside and to the outside, to the past and to the future. I built a 3D structure in which two spaces coexist: a radiant exterior space and an interior one similar to all the slums in the world.”