In 2005 the Sfeir-Semler Gallery opened in Beirut, in an industrial quarter called Karantina.
Some of you already know that Karantina was the site of a brutal massacre of civilians in 1976. I am not going to talk about this here.
The Sfeir-Semler Gallery opened on the fourth floor of a large former warehouse. It is an 800-square-meter space, with clean four-meter-high, sixty-centimeter-thick white walls, smooth concrete floors, and diffuse northern lighting all around. It is the white cube of white cubes. We have never had a space this beautiful in Beirut. Some of us have been waiting for a space like this for forty years.
The name of the person who opened the gallery is Andrée Sfeir. Andrée also owns a gallery in Hamburg that I work with. And when she opened the new space in Beirut, Andrée began asking me about the possibility of exhibiting my project called The Atlas Group (1989–2004) in the Beirut gallery.
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