Eleven Fragmented Seas (detail), 2020, bacteria incubated on analog color film scanned and printed on analog photographic paper, 11 pieces, each 115 by 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
A practicing medical doctor and trained photographer, Lara Tabet enacts performative gestures on macroscopic and microscopic scales. She combines forensics, bacteriology, and landscape photography in works that visualize historical pathologies within Lebanese society. Inhabiting the roles of artist, activist, and scientist, Tabet trespassed into Beirut’s outskirts to create Underbelly (2018), a portrait of the city at night. The installation offers a fictional narrative of unsolved murders, partly inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s detective novel 2666. Taken with a large-format camera, the staged photographs portray crime scenes in which women’s lifeless bodies lie almost imperceptible in the theatricality of nocturnal urban space. The installation also includes microscopic photography of bodily fluids ostensibly collected at the scenes. The combination of scientific data, spatial confusion, and horror elements allude to a larger danger permeating the city.
Eleven Fragmented Seas (2020) features photographs of microscopically intimate encounters with the Mediterranean Sea from the shores of Lebanon, a water-rich country in an overall arid region. This heritage has been at the heart of geopolitical struggles as well as corrupt local politics. Immediately after the civil war (1975–1990), the coastline became a tool of power: the government let the shore deteriorate to justify its future privatization. Through the study of seawater, Tabet comments on the neoliberal politics that transformed the Lebanese waterscape by mapping its microbiological content. This process corresponds to the micro-performativity of the bacteria themselves. Tabet travelled the Lebanese from south to north, withdrawing a water sample every twenty kilometers and inoculating it directly onto large-format color film. The bacterial activity mechanically and chemically alters the film’s gelatin, creating seeming landscapes that are merely encounters with the Lebanese coast and its fragmentation through time. The displayed coordinates and the bacteriology of each of the samples are a precise reminder of that reality.
