Temporary Art Platform presents ‘In the Blink of an Eye’ A series of commissions on billboards across Beirut curated by Nour Osseiran and Jad Karam, featuring intervetions by Annabel Daou, Basile Ghosn, Dalia Baassiri, Dia Mrad, Mahmoud El Safadi, Nathalie Harb, Randa Mirza, Renoz, Tamara Kalo, and Yasmina Hilal. They recently unveiled Renoz’s intervention on the Charles Helou Highway. Mahmoud Al Safadi is next, and the other artists will follow in succession. These artworks announced on TAP’s (Temporary Art Platform) Instagram live among commercial advertisements, offering a subtle yet powerful infiltration of the urban landscape. Through conversations with the artists, themes of immediacy, vulnerability, language, borders, and threatened ecologies emerged, making each work a meaningful encounter in public space.
During the 2019 uprising, billboards became platforms for public outcry, much like other public structures in Beirut. The history of billboard art includes pioneers like Jenny Holzer and the Guerrilla Girls, who subverted consumerist agendas. TAP’s (Temporary Art Platform) public art commissions offer contemporary artists opportunities to expand their practice beyond studios and galleries, engaging directly with the public.
Beirut, a city saturated with media advertisements, exemplifies this concept. Advertisements dominate highways, street corners, and every major intersection, promoting products, luxury travel, and other services. This visual pollution is a commentary on various overlapping crises. The city’s media landscape includes graffiti, murals, collages, and event posters.
Billboard advertisements have also altered urban spaces, with new structures appearing almost overnight. TAP (Temporary Art Platform) considers billboards, as a medium, ripe for artistic intervention, offering a constant conversation between image and audience. Billboards pliable spaces open to manipulation. In Beirut, the ubiquitous advertising image has become so familiar that it often goes unnoticed. However, during the 2019 crisis, the sudden absence of advertisements highlighted the economic downturn, symbolising failure and loss of desire. Randa Mirza’s ‘#crisisbillboards’ (2021) captured this phenomenon.
Past projects include Nasri Sayegh’s ‘Paysages Exquis’, which blurred the line between highway and landscape, and Omar Fakhoury and Christian Zahr’s transformation of a billboard into a public stage. In 2023, Lara Tabet’s intervention near Ain El Mraisseh speculated on releasing a bacterium into Beirut’s water system.
Location: Beirut, various locations
Dates: Check out TAP (Temporary Art Platform) instagram for announcement of the next release. This project goes on until October.
