Rabbia Sukkarieh: Early Performances on the Green Line, 1988
by Anneka Lenssen

In the summer of 2022, I emailed Rabbia Sukkarieh with an .mp4 containing snippets of video documentation of three remarkable performances she had undertaken in Beirut in 1988.

I had tracked Rabbia down via her relatively minimal artist website, which had a note identifying her as the first performance artist in Lebanon but giving few other details. (1) My colleague Salwa Mikdadi, currently a professor and director of Al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art at NYU Abu Dhabi, had previously mentioned a woman artist who had made a performance during the Lebanese Civil War on the “green line,” the five-mile-long strip of evacuated territory separating the fighting parties, leftwing and rightwing militias. (2) However, there seemed to be no extant documentation of the performance, and thus no way to bring it into dialogue with scholarship on the profusion of contemporary Lebanese art practices and new media experiments taking place a few years later, following the end of the war (that is, the remarkable work of a so- called postwar generation of artists grappling with themes of memory politics amid privatized real estate development and rehabilitated war lords).(3)

This dilemma of archival access changed for me in 2022, when I began reviewing digitized VHS tapes in a collection of papers Salwa donated to the NYU Abu Dhabi library. (4)

To my surprise, I found a dubbed segment from a Tele Liban cultural program hosted by critic Nazih Khater on which Rabbia was featured as a forerunner to a rising generation of Lebanese artists who were surviving the war and seeking out new modes of communication with audiences. (5)

In addition to collecting valuable testimony from Rabbia about her interest in using the body as a medium, Khater’s program spliced in a few seconds of two performances: Wrapping the Trees, for which Rabbia used bright green fabric to wrap dead tree trunks at the edge of then-closed Horsh Beirut (a large park area that suffered devastation under the fire of opposing forces, accelerated in 1982 by the bombing campaigns of the Israeli military during the Siege of Beirut), and Sticking the Poppies, involving planting artificial flowers into garbage heaps in Wadi Abu Jamil area, a neighborhood filled by refugees displaced from the South.

Rabbia also organized a third performance, staged within the studio itself, to which she recruited several other women and organized them into a kind of tableau vivant of feminine confrontation with the television cameras. (6)

Rabbia had not recalled the existence of a tape. In 1988, almost immediately following the performance Wrapping the Trees and the interview with Khater in the television studio, she had returned to her MFA program at Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California, where she was developing a practice based primarily on performance and installation art. This meant that Rabbia never saw the broadcast air on television. Although she likely supplied the video of Wrapping the Trees to the television station herself, the video of Sticking the Poppies seems to have been prepared by a different reporter, Najwa Makki, and may have been sourced by Khater separately from his interview with Rabbia. And, the artist may have never seen the tape of her in-studio performance at all. When she received my email, she was able to view these moving images of the performances for the very first time. In Rabbia’s email reply to me, “As for the videos; wow I have no words. Completely shocked, I had tears.”

It is a rare thrill, of course, to make a rediscovery of partially occluded documentation of major works, to revive their presence as moving experiences with a power to hail witnesses.

Equally it makes for a feeling of grave responsibility, and particularly so when the stress of the events themselves—a performance on the firing lines; longer term survival of the surpassing disaster of the war—can make it nearly impossible for participants to recall the details of even their own lived experience. In Rabbia’s case, the dissociative force of her profound displacement in the United States added to the traumatic urgency of her performative actions. When Rabbia traveled to the US to study art, it was for reasons of survival rather than opportunity in the Romantic sense of exploring foreign scenes and systems. She had recently completed her art degree at the Lebanese University, but was not a young student. She had married very young and raised two children to school age before she restarted her studies.

In 1984, by dint of her top marks in her class, she qualified for a fellowship supporting study abroad (mercifully still operating in spite of the war), which she initially declined for reasons of her family. However, when her husband’s employment ended, economic desperation drove her to accept. She spent her first years in the U.S. attending college programs in Northern and Southern California and taking odd jobs. In 1986, she managed to enroll at Art Center in Pasadena and in 1988 gained admission to its MFA program proper. Throughout this period, she seldom accumulated sufficient money to return home; only to send remittances.

It was in the summer of 1988 that Rabbia staged two performance actions in areas of Beirut—only the second visit home during her studies in the US. (7) This date corresponds to a period of heightened tension in the fifteen-year conflict known as the Lebanese Civil War, as rival factions battled on the street in West Beirut as well as the Southern suburbs and, in May 1988, the Syrian military reentered these areas under the pretext of restoring order. Which is to say that Rabbia’s turn to performance during a live war, which made clear and present the threat to live bodies, raises questions about presence and mediation that precede the problems of memory studies that scholars have tended to engage. (8)

Further, Rabbia’s work is sufficiently unusual and strong to prompt art historians to think beyond the critical fabulation of claims of firstness altogether. What follows is the beginning of a longer and not-yet finished exploration of the stakes of Wrapping the Trees and Sticking the Poppies, with reference as well to a major installation that followed, Scheherazade (1989-ongoing).

Rabbia and I have been collaborating on this project for some time now. It takes the form of both formal interviews and informal discussions, which in turn guide my ongoing archival research meant to confirm locations and dates while building up an interpretation across multiple frameworks, including of war, of poverty, of displacement and loneliness, of reversed gender roles, and of a critical awareness of the lethal effects of American empire on Lebanon, the Arab world, and the still active and unfinished Third World liberation struggle.

One way that Rabbia describes the origin of Wrapping the Trees is as an excess of emotion at the very sight of the burned trees and essentially cauterized public space of the park— the blackened trunks serving as a terrible memorial to the devastation of a city. Rabbia has described her immediate family milieu as a socially active one. Born in Baalbek, she can recall carrying banners in demonstrations in the late 1950s to protest foreign intervention in Lebanon.

As such, she felt herself gripped by a sense that it was necessary to respond to war ruins in an active rather than passive mode, and to do so before a public that at least shared a sense of hurt. As Rabbia would put it in commentary she wrote in the early 1990s, she wanted to do a performance of sufficient directness as to be legible to everyone, “from the children to taxi drivers, Syrian soldiers, and to any gangsters on the streets.” (9)

On one of her final days in Beirut, Rabbia gathered lengths of bright green satin fabrics and enacted a makeshift ritual of healing, wrapping the trunks one-by-one. Her collaborator was a cameraperson whose identity is no longer recalled (we think they may have been a theater student, which would have facilitated access to camcorder technology). Because the park fell within the so-called green line, to make the performance there and document it with a video camera required Rabbia to seek permission from fighting forces in the neighborhood, including al-Murabitun (a predominantly Sunni militia force associated with an anti-establishment, pan-Arab political interests) and local Syrian commanding officers, to enter the restricted area. Given the presence of land-mines and active snipers, the artist was to proceed entirely at her own risk. And, in fact, it seems snipers did fire at targets during the performance, spooking the cameraperson into fleeing after only a few seconds of tape. Although no local sound is retained (in the television program, the image is dubbed into Rabbia’s narration on an unrelated point), the visuals suggest the cameraperson calls out to Rabbia in fear. We see the artist throw up a hand, end the performance, and start to jog away.

We can see in the footage that the artist wore a particular costume that she hand stitched from brightly colored red fabric. And in the television studio, she added a fringed headwrap that partially obscured her eyes. Rabbia had already begun to incorporate similar dress into performances she was developing at Pasadena, where she was interested in heightening and occasionally transgressing her status as a citizen of a wartorn country and thus a “different” political subject. As the chair of the program recalls it, Rabbia “made us aware of the sufferings and tragedy of war and of the way that art can actively address them.” (10)

Once transposed back to Beirut, Rabbia surmised that the costume gave her courage; it made an image out of the semipermeable membrane between self and onlookers that interested her at the time.

Rabbia’s other performance in public in the summer of 1988, Sticking the Poppies, brought in additional participants from Rabbia’s circle. With the aid of her sons, the artist made dozens of artificial, long-stemmed poppies out of red fabrics tied onto stripped poplar branches. These she took to a neighborhood that had been made into temporary housing for war-refugees from the occupied South, where a lack of services meant that heaps of garbage mixed with defensive sandbags and clogged the streets.

Working with at least one now unidentified friend as a helper, as well as (again) a cameraperson, Rabbia stuck the long stems of these poppies into the heaps. As with Wrapping the Trees, the conceptualization of Sticking the Poppies involved an element of juxtaposition of natural and artificial elements, with materials that seem to be a kind of wreckage become a stage for the artist to introduce a brightly artificial supplement (as in adding bright fabric to burnt trees). Less a meditation on the loss of nature than a fascination with sparking new relations between people and things, the performance acquired its “form” through its recruitment of spontaneous participants. The footage shows Rabbia handing poppies to a small crowd of children, who assist her in distributing them in the heaps. When she wrote up the experience later, she articulated an inversion of audience and performers, recalling how “hundreds” of eyes gathered, and how, as “they gathered./ and watched./ they did not know they are the performance./ they did not know they are the art.” (11)

In this period, Rabbia spoke often about her desire to make direct connections with audiences. While speaking to the television camera, she mentions that a driver had stopped her to ask about her motivation for Wrapping the Trees, wondering aloud about whether her inspiration had come in a dream. This aspect of her practice may have been the most appealing one to a critic such as Khater, whose evaluative matrix political commitment and whose judgments tended to reference a notion of a relatively unified history of development of Lebanese arts.

Crucially, however, Rabbia’s work also queried problems of inaccessibility to audiences—and chiefly the inaccessibility of Lebanese suffering to American audiences in Southern California.

The MFA program that Rabbia attended, which had only recently been established, was indeed known for the cool criticality of its graduate faculty, many of whom had recently defected from CalArts, including Stephen Prina, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Mike Kelley. The curriculum offered artists little space to make overtly political work linking to active occupation and struggle. Finding herself unwilling to adopt a stance of disaffection, Rabbia resorted to making performances that staged an aporia between “the critic” as a figure of judgment and herself as a body that acts and exists in inscrutable ways, and which perpetually seeks ways to draw viewers in. In the years preceding and following her Wrapping the Trees and Sticking the Poppies performances, Rabbia used volunteers from fellow women art students to create group performances. Titling the works with descriptions of intersubjective difference—Them and Me, followed by Me and Them, and Us and Them—she clad groups of women in versions of robes and veils and positioned them on stage, at once offering and obscuring in the eyes of others.

These activated gender as a site of misapprehension. They also extended, at points, into explorations of linguistic difference. One performance featured an adjunct scene in Rabbia’s studio where she sat with a hatchet, drew circles on the floor in different media (including writing the Fatiha in Arabic in liquid gold), and informed the critics, in Arabic, that she was using her paintings as a backdrop to her testimony to the human crisis. As she recalls, the critics lasted very few minutes before perceiving the incomprehensible speech as too confrontational and storming off.

We have access to some of Rabbia’s further commentary on these points of tension in her performance practice in the form of her MFA thesis, filed in 1989. In stark contrast to her peers’ word processor documents and full scholarly apparatus of footnotes and figures, Rabbia employs an unruly medium—longhand writing in pencil, supplemented by occasional pasted-in images—and aphoristic style of confession. The document is meant primarily to provide discursive support to Scheherazade, a remarkable painting installation of 101 square compositions, each 15 by 15 inches, that she made for her thesis exhibition. (12) Accordingly, the pages of the document reveal Rabbia’s self-identification with the character of Scheherazade, the beguiling feminine figure of unparalleled creative powers who, night after night, ensures her survival by so thoroughly entertaining a murderous king that he spares her life so as to hear another story. On one page, she writes by way of reference to both her performances on the firing lines of Beirut and her subsistence labor in Los Angeles that she “refuses to die.”

Just as importantly, on other pages, Rabbia pledges herself to the work of solidarity with other struggles against racist occupation. One powerful declaration reads, in concentrated prose, “the Third World problems sleep between my eyelids.” This declaration sharpens the critical stakes of the practice. For, it acknowledges the difficulty of sleep amid conditions of personal and political emergency. Yet it also acts as an intertextual reference to 1001 Nights, as told by Scheherazade, that is translated into popular literature, children’s tales, and song lyrics. The particular story involves a jinn who is overcome at the sight of his beloved, a princess, and exclaims, “how I wish you would sleep between my eyelids forever.” Within the story, the utterance is a sign of lovesickness. Once mobilized in the artist’s thesis as a description of holding something close, the naming of a posture of vigilance in this way—as sleeping between another’s eyelids—helps to mark a particularly vexed dynamics of desire for direct action. It places the object of attention in the center of an eye, yet in doing so, it enforces blindness.

Given the date of these works, created over the period 1987-1989, an art historian is tempted to draw parallels to the performance practices of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, who is almost the same age as Rabbia and grew up in Beirut (albeit never identifying as Lebanese). Famously, Mona became stranded in London in 1975, following the outbreak of war in Lebanon, and went on to pursue art degrees there. Throughout the 1980s, Mona presented numerous durational performances that offer her own body as a vector within hostile landscapes of war and media devoted to “othering” and vilifying liberation causes. The 1983 work The Negotiating Table—first presented in Canada during a residency—responded to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut with a performance involving lying motionless wrapped in plastic, bathed by the sounds of disingenuous news broadcasts. There is a kindred quality to be found in these artists’ insistence on maintaining responsiveness to war in and through their art. Yet, Rabbia’s performances in Beirut also show significant distinctions from Mona’s celebrated oeuvre.

Rabbia’s primary modality is that of direct vulnerability, not deconstruction of power. The danger she staged was real danger; the body she registers in the video is a frightened one, a subject who lives a feeling of panic as opposed to calling upon it (or simulating it) for a performance. Further, these works remain largely personalizing. The artist’s actions, demeanor, and costume serve to concentrate perception of her fear and difficulty as an individuated and yet interconnected subject of a wartime society.

Anneka Lenssen, tenure of Art History at UC Berkeley.

1 In 1988 itself, the Lebanese art critic Nazih Khater identified Rabbia as the first young artist in the country to moveinto performance as a primary medium. This essay will refer to the artist and other protagonists by their first names, in accordance with conventions of Arabic-language cultural criticism.

2 Salwa Mikdadi included Rabbia’s painting installation, Scheherazade, in a major touring exhibition of Arab women artists, titled “Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World,” which opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., Feb. 7, 1993-May 15, 1994. Rabbia’s biographical entry in the exhibition catalog mentions two performances, but there is no documentation. The only images are of Scheherazade.

3 Art world interest in the postwar generation of artists and thinkers, among them Walid Raad, Walid Sadek, Akram Zaatari, Lamia Joreige, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, and others, was consolidated in the early 2000s by such exhibition initiatives as Catherine David, ed., Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations, Beirut Lebanon (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002) and Suzanne Cotter, ed., Out of Beirut (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), many of which emphasized the critical edge of the fragile institutionality of the postwar Lebanese art world, which was seeing worldly artists, many of whom had returned following the 1989 Taif accords, don multiple hats to set up new conditions of exhibition and criticism. One imagines a productive reading of Rabbia’s work in comparison with the important film of Lamia Joreige, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003), involving walking the old green line and interviewing survivors about lost and kidnapped persons. Or, a consideration of what it is to be a “first” performance artist alongside artist Walid Sadek’s discussion of the so-called “first” installation art in his essay in David’s Tamáss volume, which, Walid highlights, was made by Ziad Abillama in 1992 on a small stretch of beach formerly holding a rubbish heap. Remarkably, working only four years apart, but in different temporal relationships to war, both Rabbia and Ziad opted to work with themes of waste products and refashioning.

4 “Sukkarieh, Rabia: unidentified Arabic broadcast,” Box: AV-1, object: ID: 022.0029, Artist interviews and documentary footage, 1987-2013, Salwa Mikdadi papers, MC-022, New York University Abu Dhabi Library, Abu Dhabi, UAE. A label on the tape gives a date of 1992, but that would seem to be the date of the dubbing not the broadcast itself.

5 The program was called Thaqafa wa Nas. Tele Liban was one of the last remaining national television stations in a media landscape otherwise dominated by political and military organizations. Exact date of airing remains to be determined.

6 I discuss Rabbia’s innovative use of television and video technologies in a longer article, currently under development.

7 There is some inconsistency in the record, but “Beirut Summer 88” is the periodization indicated in the text of Rabbia’s MFA thesis. See Rabia Sukkarieh, Shaherazad, filed with Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, April 21, 1990, unpaginated.

8 It is the artists themselves who raised problems of memory, including false memory and traumatic symptoms, in their work. See Sarah Rogers, “Forging History, Performing Memory: Walid Raʿad’s The Atlas Project,” Parachute no. 108 (October 2002).

9 Rabbia recorded a second video, a kind of video portfolio showing work with commentary, that she prepared as a curatorial reference for Forces of Change. See “Some of my work,” Box: AV-1, object: ID: 022.0053, Artist interviews and documentary footage, 1987-2013, Salwa Mikdadi papers, MC-022, New York University Abu Dhabi Library, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

11 Rabbia makes use of this aphoristic summary of the role played by the child participants two times. It appears once in her MFA thesis, unnumbered page with title “Beirut Summer 88.” The same description appears in artist statements and materials sent to Salwa in the 1990s. See “Rabia Sukkarieh: biographical,” box 25, folder 8, Artists files (individual), 1960-2005, Salwa Mikdadi papers, MC-022, New York University Abu Dhabi Library, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

12 Cited above. Rabia Sukkarieh, Shaherazad, filed with Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, April 21, 1990, unpaginated.