The man in Karantina who reads what Beirut threw away

Alfred Tarazi works in a studio in Karantina, the industrial strip east of Beirut's port, cutting up magazines and newspapers that were on their way to the bin. From the fragments he builds collages in which the singer Asmahan resurfaces alongside armed men and advertisements. His exhibition and screening, A Lover's Manifesto: The Lebanese Experiment, closes today.

He was born in Beirut in 1980, five years into the civil war, and took a degree in graphic design at the American University of Beirut in 2004. The studio he works in now sits in a district that carries its own scars — Karantina, named for the Ottoman quarantine station where arriving passengers were held before they were let into the city, was the site of a massacre in January 1976 and among the neighbourhoods worst damaged when the port exploded on 4 August 2020.

L'Orient Today, in an article by Nanette Ziadé-Ritter, calls him an unofficial guardian of historical memory — a role normally left to public institutions. Tarazi refuses to give history lessons. He passes on the foundational narratives anyway, by laying them side by side and letting the reader see what the country published about itself.

The method was set out in Memory of a Paper City, which he mounted in 2022 at Umam Documentation and Research in Haret Hreik. That work drew on more than a hundred Lebanese publications printed between the 1930s and the late 1980s, sorted around two motifs that kept recurring in their pages: women as figures of freedom and sexuality, and images of armed struggle. Umam was founded by the publisher Lokman Slim and the filmmaker Monika Borgmann. Slim was shot dead in his car in southern Lebanon in February 2021. Tarazi was given the prize that carries his name two years later.

Asmahan belongs in these collages for reasons the paper itself explains. Born Amal al-Atrash in 1912, into a Druze family from Jabal al-Druze, she sang and acted in Cairo at the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s, and then the car she was travelling in went into an irrigation canal near Mansoura in the Nile Delta. She and her companion drowned. The driver got out. She was 31, and the Arab modernity she embodied was left unfinished — which is precisely the subject Tarazi keeps returning to.

His work is held by the British Museum; Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna represents him, after a residency there in 2011. None of that changes what happens in the studio. Somebody throws paper away. He picks it up, and what would otherwise have vanished is held a while longer.