Market 160 – 169
Founder of the eponymous gallery established in Hamburg (1998) and Beirut (2005), Andrée Sfeir-Semler talks with journalist Rahel Aima about her background in Lebanon and Europe and her career as a woman art dealer.
RAHEL AIMA: Could you tell me about your early years, in broad strokes?
ANDRÉE SFEIR-SEMLER:
I grew up in Beirut and studied at the American University of Beirut. I studied fine arts and filmmaking and received a Fulbright Scholarship, in addition to getting accepted into UCLA. In the meantime, however, I met a man who I fell in love with and applied for a DAAD scholarship as well. In the end I decided to go to Germany on a DAAD instead. I studied filmmaking in Munich, which I did not like, and ended up switching to art history. I changed universities and went to Bielefeld, where I continued my studies and received another scholarship. I met with Pierre Bourdieu and went to Paris and wrote my PhD, which was on the emerging art scene in France in the nineteenth century. Worldwide, [the Paris Salon] was seen as the place to exhibit art if you wanted to have an international career. So my thesis was also a study of the emergence of an international art scene as it was taking place. Not by commission, that is, but for a bourgeois private-public, and also the development of the artist from the artisan-craftsman to the professional, who became a star in this Parisian scene.
That’s interesting, because you later did a similar thing, forging an international scene where there wasn’t one before, first in Kiel and later in Beirut. So you opened the gallery in 1985…
I was in Kiel in the middle of nowhere, got an offer to take over an art gallery, and I started right away. I had a child and didn’t want to go away from the city where my husband was working. I immediately went into art fairs in order to publicize our program. I started working very quickly with wellknown international artists such as Ian Hamilton Finlay, Ulrich Rückriem, and Robert Barry. In 1998, I moved the gallery to Hamburg as our daughter left for university. That’s where I started focusing more on younger artists with whom I would start working early on in their career. At the end of the nineties I encountered the work of an artist, Walid Raad, in an exhibition curated by Catherine David. I approached Walid and immediately started representing him. This was a pivotal moment. Through Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, I began looking at art from Lebanon and the Arab World, and started representing his friends—Akram Zaatari, Rabih Mroué, and Marwan Rechmaoui…
So opening an outpost in Beirut made sense…
I decided to open a gallery as there was nothing of this kind in the Arab world. I found a space at the end of 2004 and planned on opening the gallery in April 2005. Then the prime minister was assassinated, and many protests [subsequently] broke out. Despite the many killings and car bombs in Beirut, we decided to proceed with the opening. We opened the gallery on April 9, a Saturday.
It was the same day as two politicians decided to call for a rally in the city to remove the [occupying] Syrian soldiers from the country, and to stop the military curfew! The city was amazing. You would see Lebanese flags everywhere, and lots of people came to the opening. It was a very big event. It marked the rebirth of the city, which unfortunately did not continue in the same way—but still, it was an amazing moment. I started developing the career of several artists from the Arab World. I also took on board artists from an older generation who were forgotten, such as Etel Adnan, Marwan, and many others. We had a lot of success all over the world.
How does your background and training as an artist and filmmaker affect your approach to running a gallery?
I think that if you are trained as an artist yourself, you have a better understanding of how good an artist is and of their potential, because you see the work from both sides. From a removed point of view, with the training I have had in both art history and in history, as well as from the making component—I’ve made it myself, so
I know what it means. I completely stopped making art myself when I decided to open the gallery. I will never start making art again. I mean, it would be impossible. I wouldn’t be able to do it because I am too biased now. You can’t be on both sides. You cannot defend artists and be an artist yourself.
What about hybrid critic-artists, like Adrian Piper?
I think that’s also very difficult. I always think that you have to make decisions. You cannot be a critic and have a gallery, and you cannot be an artist and criticize other artists. At some point you have to decide what you want to do. At the beginning of one’s career it might be possible, but the more you do, honestly, you simply don’t have the time. The day is made up of 24 hours. You can’t do it all. It’s impossible.
I’m curious what drew you to filmmaking. There’s a turn to video in that generation of Lebanese artists which you don’t necessarily see in other countries, even in the immediate region.
There is no tradition of visual arts or painting in our part of the world. Historically, the Arab World has a tradition of storytelling and not so much of painting or drawing like in Persia, India, Europe or the States. Therefore, you encounter lots of artists who do video art or performance because they tell stories in order to express artistic ideas.
In fact, Egyptian cinema is probably the first really contemporary way to express art in our region. If you were to look at visual artists, painters or sculptors from the previous century, all of them paint or draw or sculpt similarly to what they would see in the West. And none of them have an expression in their shapes, forms, and colors that is rooted in something very original from the Arab World.
This is the reason why I am more interested in artists who do performance and film and installation, who try to retrace and write history. And that’s how they get to their own artistic expression, trying to find their deep inner self within a socio-geographic context.
Before getting back to Beirut, I wanted to ask why you moved to Hamburg versus Berlin at the time?
It was actually the easiest choice. Seeing it from today’s perspective, I could easily have moved to Berlin, and I was offered beautiful spaces for very little money—but Hamburg is right next door to Kiel. It’s only a hundred kilometers away. I knew lots of people in Hamburg already and my husband was working for a German TV company, and was moved from Kiel to Hamburg. That’s why Hamburg was an easy step, versus the setup in a new capital like Berlin.
From today’s perspective, perhaps it would have made more sense to move to Berlin, but now I’m so established in Hamburg, and I like Hamburg more than Berlin for several reasons. It is like a self-contained city. Berlin is a city you travel through, to or from. I like the peace that Hamburg has versus the hectic atmosphere of a city like Berlin. And Berlin is a very poor city with lots of debt, so regarding clients, you need to find them elsewhere. They are not in Berlin. We are only one and a half hours from Berlin and somehow I feel good in Hamburg. If I need a hub, I just travel
to Beirut. If I was to relive it all again, perhaps I would go to Berlin, but now I’m in Hamburg.
What was the scene like in Beirut at the time, and also in the broader region?
There was some art but there were no galleries, not the way you understand it in the West. They weren’t large, clear white cubes which were like an art institution rather than an art shop. What we built is a space that could represent the work as if it were in a Western institution. The cube. At that time in Beirut, there was nothing at all like this. Even today, there are no proper framers, there’s no-one to print photos properly, and no archivers, I mean the whole infrastructure is non-existent. And in the beginning we didn’t have any collectors from Lebanon or from the Arab World. Now there are several collectors who really work seriously towards making collections with artists from the Arab World.
And what’s the market like now?
Lebanon is going through a very, very tough economic crisis, I think even tougher than during the war. We have two million Syrians in the country, versus four million Lebanese, and lots of money has left Lebanon. So the public we sell art works to are mostly expats who come on holiday to Lebanon or who we meet at art fairs.
Why did you choose to set up a commercial gallery versus a nonprofit?
I considered starting a foundation instead of a commercial gallery, but for a foundation you need money. So I thought I’d rather sell work and finance something high-end rather than going to beg for money. If you have a foundation, you cannot build up the career of an artist and follow up on the work which that artist is doing over the years. And that is what I’m interested in. I was thinking that if I open a gallery, not only would I give those artists a chance to make a living but also, when you sell work in societies, you leave an impact in collections and in the histories of those countries. And the artists leave traces, many more than if it were in a foundation. Because the work we do is equivalent to whatever a museum would do in the West, and because we never focus on the commercial side of selling.
I read somewhere that Beirut is now your main gallery and Hamburg
supports it—but I’m curious if you show different things in each location?
The main gallery has now become Beirut and Hamburg works as an embassy to Beirut. In practical terms we always work online. We always speak with the Beirut gallery on Skype, and vice versa. Now the focus is much more on artists from the Arab World, and on the artists we started working with in the early 2000s. Now I just started taking on artists from other marginal regions such as Dineo Seshee Bopape from South Africa. Because these artists are also strongly linked to what we do in the Arab World. I will also start taking on board artists from other regions whose work engages issues of human rights and strives for freedom.
And is this attention to politics how you would characterize the program? Though, of course, artists from the region will be read as de facto political, regardless.
Yes. I think that I would characterize the gallery as a gallery for conceptual and minimal art that takes human rights and socio-geographic conditions into consideration. I wouldn’t describe it as a political program because I never want to go into daily politics. My interest is rather in freedom, in human rights, and in socio-geographic contexts. I’m more interested in when an artist looks at politics, distances themselves from it, and then comes back with a product.
How is it running a gallery in Lebanon, with the notoriously finicky customs?
Things are hard in Lebanon. Customs estimate the artwork with the value they decide, they consult the internet, and whatever they find, they don’t trust the list of prices you give them. They always think that you’re trying to cheat them. And customs is a very big, complicated machine to work with. Now we bring the work to Lebanon on a carnet ATA which is like a traveling passport for artworks. But everything needs to return to Germany, and I have insurance from the chamber of commerce in Hamburg, Germany in order to bring the work to Lebanon so that the Lebanese customs can’t argue about it.
I know you travel a lot, but what’s a typical day like in Beirut, or in Hamburg?
When I am in Beirut, we mainly set up the exhibition. We take down the previous show and set up the new show. Once the show opens I leave again. And when I’m there, I mainly see the artists. I make many, many studio visits, or the
artists come to the gallery and show me their new work and we discuss ideas, projects, plans, or exhibitions in museums. Whereas in Hamburg, it’s more focused on management. Working on the art fairs, organizing the archive and transportation of work, as well as all my traveling from Hamburg. For example, I’m going to Venice next week, and then I’ll be in Amsterdam for Walid Raad at Stedelijk Museum. The week after, I’m in Maastrich at Bonnefantenmuseum for Marwan Rechmaoui. And the week after that, we will prepare the shipment for Art Basel. So when I am here at my desk in Hamburg, I really organize the shows and longer-term projects that are coming up, in 2020, 2021, and so on.
Finally, what are you excited about? Not necessarily with your gallery but in the world or on a very small scale?
I think that we are in a very difficult moment. World politics is very frightening and the economic situation in Europe and in the world is very threatening. You have the Western world that is really wealthy, but which is becoming more and more populistic. On the other hand, you have the third world and the many refugees coming to Europe, either for economic gain or for issues of human rights, and of course, they need to come because they can’t stay where they are. But at the same time, you can’t take them all because as one journalist wrote: “If Calcutta comes to Hamburg, Hamburg will become Calcutta.” So it’s really a very complicated situation at the moment, and when I look at the Middle East, for example Art Dubai this year was very, very difficult because the Qataris could not come, the Saudis did not come, the Kuwaitis and the Bahrainis did not come either, so it becomes an isolated situation. Whatever happens in the Arab World, there are not united energies. Each nation does their own thing, and that’s also very sad. I don’t think that art can change the world, of course not, but art can comment on the contemporary situation and can open the eyes of the few who may look. Art can create a chance of awakening in the future.