ZIAD ANTAR

In his latest project, Antar navigates the intersection of personal and national history through the lens of the sunflower. He recalls: “When I lived in Saida as a child, it wasn’t safe to roam the streets freely. Instead, I would gather with my neighbors on the stairs of our building to play. An adult would suddenly appear with a bag filled with sunflower seeds, a very common snack in Lebanon, which we would eat with great joy. Before going to bed, we were asked to collect the shells scattered on the floor. It was our playground”. Through his training as an agricultural engineer, Antar later discovered the flower’s conflicted colonial and neocolonial history mirroring the country’s intricate geopolitical and socio-economic landscape.

During the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), economic instability, poverty, and unemployment pushed rural communities to turn to illicit cultivation of cannabis and poppy for survival during the conflict. After the war, international organizations pressured the government to replace illicit crops with legal alternatives, proposing sunflowers as a viable option. However, sunflowers require specific conditions for optimal growth, which were not readily available in Lebanon’s mountainous regions where cannabis thrived. The failure of the sunflower project is a reflection on the Lebanese economic vulnerability and export dependency. It reveals the violence and oppression hidden in its symbolic image, while representing the paradoxical nature of human existence, situated between past and future, war and peace, beauty and violence.

By inhabiting this contradiction, Antar sees in the growth of the sunflower, a metaphor of our existence. The heliotropic movement of the plant is a process whereby it performs a diurnal dance from east to west, reorienting itself towards the sunrise during the night. Upon reaching full maturity, the plant will cease its movement ultimately facing the earth. Antar’s fascination with this phenomenon led him to explore new creative avenues to grasp the sunflower’s essence, acknowledging the impossibility of fully capturing its dynamic motion with a traditional analog camera. Following his experimental approach, he decided to apply paint on the blurred areas of each picture. The resulting porosity of the images is revealed in their ambivalence, suspended in a nostalgic material space where the trace of the sunflower’s movement exists only as a memory.