Gallery guide

 

Upon entering the installation, WALKING IN WAR is a floor of broken mirrors, an alert to the difficult terrains to come.


KILLING MANNEQUIN, with images played in TV sets, shows "tributes" paid to war, in the form of remnants of blasted mannequins previously from a window display in the city. The TVs are encased in gabions (stone filled wire cages used in civil engineering and flood control), in an attempt to restrain the evil forces of destruction.

TOY FIGHTERS depicts three men on bar stools during a firing interval. Played to the winding and unwinding of a musical box, the effect is to echo the continual fuelling of the war.


One climbs up the stairs to reach the level of the angels, surveying and transcending the BRIDGES. Despite the breakdown of communication and eradication of links to the past, one is compelled to go on, trudging along and echoing the Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett's « I cannot go on ... I have to go on ... I cannot go on ... I will go on ... ».

Hope takes the forme of a pair of metallic "wings" of an imaginary angel which are made from warped zinc barriers from alongside the former highways and bridges.

Looking down, as if into an archaeological pit with a mosaic in the centre of the room are STRANGE GAMES, played out by the children of troubled times.

ERASING CITIES is suspended from above and represents memories of continuous conflicts. Here, Saab suggestes that this city in distress could be yours too, if memories are kept short and if lessons are not learnt. She admonishes war and the repeating cycle of destruction around the world.

 

 

The ravages of time, pain and suffering are reflected on the faces of the MOTHERS (also in the suspended garden), who are the witnesses of this merciless tragedy.

Coming down from the stairs and into the garden, one sees a bas-relief of corpses in ENGRAVING As if viewing a Roman or Phoenician stele, one imagines and wishes that the figures on them will come alive again.

Further, on a gabion is STADIUM HOPSCOTCH where a young girl plays hopscotch in the ruins of a stadium, as if recovering her childhood and the sense of normalcy that was robbed from her.


In the next gabion is SEX AND GUN where children imitate adults firing off a cannon. Here Saab wonders if frustration is inherent in men.

On the LCD screens in the outdoor cinema is ROSE GAME where a young girl is thwarting life and death like a man darting across the street under fire from snipers.

The absurd scene is repeated in CRAZY SNIPER where children provoke and distract a sniper with a mannequin. Such are scenes taken from a normal day in a city embattled.

Lastly Saab signs off her work with MY BURNED HOUSE in which she shares the intimate and profound experience of revisiting her old wounds by returning to the site of her burnt-down house.