This website is a platform for art and artists concerned with war and its aftermath. Its basis is Art & War, a biennial event organized by the Treaty of Utrecht. The first edition of this two-week event, that took place in September 2006 (featuring artists from the Netherlands, the Balkans and the Middle-East), provided the material we are starting with.

Art has never stopped a war. But art can be a refuge, a lifeline, a protest, a place for mourning, beauty against high odds and even humor. And artists can help restore some kind of balance after the war is over: countering triumphant nationalism, seeking clarity in the memory of violence, creating glimpses of a more human future. continue reading

Tony Chakar (Beirut) is an architect, writer and artist, and a very gifted city thinker. His essays investigate the way this city’s turbulent past haunts the consciousness of its inhabitants and continues to shape its architecture today. In his texts, it is often hard to tell when historical knowledge blurs into myth and the contortions of memory. Most evenings, when midnight approaches, he emerges from a long day of teaching and writing to poise himself behind the computer at café Le Baromètre, a glass of whisky at hand. Carefully unshaven, the lips visibly thirsty for liquor and company, the eyes piercing but unfathomable, he is a fascinating regular among the cultural community of the Hamra neighborhood.

We would have loved him to come to the Art&War festival in September. Voices like his were vital at the time, to explain something of the shell-shocked atmosphere in Beirut after the summer war. In the end, Tony decided he was not ready to travel yet. Why? He explains in this sad and beautiful letter.

During last summer’s war in Lebanon, young video artist Hassan Choubassi fled Beirut and stayed at his family’s house in the mountains. What was there to do but to live the imitation of daily life? His sister Nathalie, a conservatory student, persisted in doing her piano exercises…