Review:
Reading Mohamad Hafeda’s Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut

In Negotiating Conflict in Lebanon: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut, Mohamad Hafeda introduces four bodies of work that he made between 2009 and 2013 in response to the city, in particular the Mazraa district. Each body of work employs a different creative practice for negotiating the many forms of borders that the citizens of Beirut face every day, whether these are suggested and enforced through administration, surveillance, sound or physical displacement. The book presents a beautiful, considered and delicate dance around and between the political-sectarian conflict that pervades the city and proposes ways to quietly subvert its multiple and un-ending, but always shifting, boundaries through observation and artistic transformation.