PERCEIVING LEBANESE NATIONHOOD

Artist Statement

By centering the Lebanese passport—an object engineered to broadcast a single, frictionless narrative—Perceiving Lebanese Nationhood exposes a republic sustained by several, often rival, origin myths. The official booklet’s tranquil vignettes of cedar groves, coastal cliffs, and Mount Lebanon facades soothe the eye with a tidy geography, yet they leave its people—and their divergent self-understandings—unseen. This is a passport of territory, not of nation—yet it is the nation that travels, not the land.

Confronting this design error, the project poses a deceptively simple question: What should a passport for the Lebanese nation—rather than merely for the Lebanese state—look like? Extensive primary research—including a wide-ranging survey that asked, for instance, “Do you feel pride in your Lebanese identity? If not, do you nonetheless feel responsible for Lebanon’s social fabric? … What events or figures would more powerfully symbolize the nation?”—yielded no single, satisfactory answer.

Unable to distill one definitive design, the artist chose not to filter the findings, but instead placed them on view—inviting each viewer to search for pages that might anchor a common Lebanese passport, or to imagine whatever further exercises the material inspires. Archival work, political theory, and survey data reveal a dilemma: Does the Lebanese polity still offer a common shelter of meaning, or merely corral competing narratives beneath one roof? Is Lebanon a unified nation, or a constellation of intersecting sub-nations—and, if the latter, can that constellation ever agree on a shared image?

To test the question, the artist distilled three overlapping visions into three parallel passports: Lebanon as a haven for regional ethnic minorities; Lebanon as a linchpin of Arab unity; Lebanon as a beacon of progressive democracy in the Middle East. These narratives behave like tectonic plates—sometimes interlocking to form stable civic ground, sometimes grinding apart to expose fault lines that resist alignment. Perceiving Nationhood invites viewers to trace both the seams of convergence and the fractures of tension that shape contemporary Lebanese experience.

A news-ticker-style text frieze runs along the gallery’s base, its headline cadence cataloguing historic partitions and secessions. This element spotlights the specter of separation—imagining how adherents of the three narratives might fracture into distinct states, or otherwise reconfigure. It asks which splits arrive too late and wound, which unfold by design, and on what grounds societies decide to divide. The work does not necessarily advocate disunion; rather, it challenges Lebanon to reckon with the ever-present possibility of reshaping its structure—or to affirm the current form and claim it as a nation.

Perceiving Lebanese Nationhood surfaces these questions at a moment when Lebanon has yet to conduct a shared reckoning with its civil-war past—or even to teach that conflict from a single textbook. Perhaps it must first accept that the war cannot be narrated from one frame alone. By reframing the cultural mosaic, the project situates live debates—from constitutional reform to revived federalist proposals—within a broader, shifting meditation on what “nationhood” can be when divergence is not evaded but made visible, legible, and, perhaps, shared.

Text of the Laser-Printed Frieze

1 × Laser Colored Print (15 ft × 3.5 in.)

A 15-foot news-ticker text frieze lines the gallery’s base, listing historic state partitions and secessions in the cadence of breaking-news headlines.

The text reads: 

"1863: Virginia and West Virginia Split Over Core Ethical Principles; Can a Nation Unify Without Agreeing on Human Rights? An Intrinsic or Externally Driven Decision?" | "Faith, Religion, and Ethno-religious Traditions: Drawing Parallels with the Irreparable India-Pakistan Partition in 1947, Fueled by British Colonial Legacy" | "1993: Czechoslovakia's Peaceful Divorce - A Study in Nationhood for Societies with Diverse Identities; Can External Powers Tip the Scales?" | "Yugoslavia's 1990s Breakup: The Perils of Suppressed Differences in Multicultural Nations, Exacerbated by Global Interests" | "Eritrea Gains Independence from Ethiopia in 1993: A Tale of Nationalism Born Out of Cultural Distinctiveness Amidst Foreign Intrigue" | "2011: South Sudan's Struggle for Autonomy - The Impact of Historical Marginalization on a Nation's Unity and the Role of Global Players" | "Ireland and Northern Ireland's Ongoing Conflict Since 1921: The Fragility of National Cohesion in the Face of Deep-seated Differences and British Influence" | "2014: Crimea Annexed by Russia - The Struggle for Identity Amid Competing Allegiances and External Powers, a Lesson in Ukraine's Pursuit for Sovereignty" | "1958-1961: United Arab Republic - Abdel Nasser's Vision of Arab Unity Falters Amid Conflicting National Interests and Tensions; Lebanon Refuses to Join"