Museums and heritage sites around Lebanon will once again be celebrating International Museum Day on May 18, with free entrance to several sites, workshops, tours and events taking place into next week.
The International Council of Museums established the International Museum Day in 1977 to encourage public awareness of the role of museums in the development of society.
This year’s theme is “Museums as Cultural Hubs: The future of tradition.” While a museum’s primary missions is collecting, conservation, research and exhibition, museums are trying to transform their practices to become closer to the communities they serve.
This often includes ways of attracting people to see a museum as more than just the collection it holds, by running engaging social and educational actives a sentiment championed by the actives on International Museum Day around the world.
The Lebanese National Committee of ICOM will be opening the doors of all ICOM member museums free of charge Saturday, including places like the National Museum, the Mineral Museum and the Lebanese Prehistoric Museum.
Jbeil’s Modern and Contemporary Art Museum is holding an open day Saturday, inviting people to visit their growing permanent exhibition “A Century of Sculptural Art in Lebanon.”
“MACAM’s permanent exhibition displays 450 sculptures by 85 renowned Lebanese artists,” co-founder Gabriele Schaub told The Daily Star. “The artworks are displayed in two large refurbished factory halls: The Modern Art Hall, which showcases sculptures according to their material - metal, wood, stone and ceramics - and two special rooms dedicated to the pioneering stone sculptor Alfred Basbous and the woman sculptor Mouazza Rawda.
“The Contemporary Art Hall displays installation art, ranging from conceptual artworks in mixed media to video installations by Samia Halaby, Nada Sehnaoui, Mario Saba, Mazen Kerbaj etc.,” she added. “The artists represented at MACAM shaped the local artistic heritage and some of them gained international recognition.”
The Archaeological Museum of the American University of Beirut will be hosting an illustrated lecture by artist Rayyane Tabet on May 22, titled “Fragmented Realities: How 194 Reliefs Excavated in Tell Halaf, Syria, by Baron Max von Oppenheim Ended up in Seven Museums Around the World.”
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“Rayyane Tabet is the great grandson of Fayek Borkoche, who worked as a translator with the Baron Max von Oppenheim,” museum director Leila Badre told The Daily Star, “the German archaeologist who excavated the major [Neolithic] site of Tell Halaf located near the Turkish border in the vicinity of the modern city of Hassakeh in Syria.
“During the excavations, in the years 1911-13, 194 orthostates (an upright stone or slab) were discovered belonging to the Hittite civilization (circa 1400 B.C.),” she added. “Rayyane wanted to revive the memory of the site by reconnecting with the history of these stone blocks, some of which were destroyed or lost. “He found 30 of them scattered in seven different museums in New York, Baltimore, London, Paris, Berlin and Pergamon,” she added. “Several others were stored in the Aleppo Museum. Rayyane has made rubbing of some of these orthostates.”
Sursock Museum is hosting a book launch for “Geometry and Art in the Modern Middle East” by Roxane Zand and Sussan Babaie, in collaboration with Letitia Gallery Saturday. It will be followed by a conversation between Zand and Khaled O. Azzam, the director of London’s Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. The book looks at the practice of 24 artists who approach geometry from different perspectives.
The Culture Ministry and the General Directorate of Antiquities has also organized tours of Eshmoun archeological site, which will be open on May 20 for a tour and a discourse about methods of excavation, pottery restoration and mosaic preservation.
For more info check the artists’ individual museum sites or call 03-135-781 for the Eshmoun tour.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
