SPARKLING CITY 

Sparkling City casts a dark narrative on the possible transformation in Daliet el Raouche in Beirut as the last undeveloped shore in Ras Beirut. Reimagining the Arab cities through mixed media paintings as commentary on social and urban change, has been central in Inass Yassin painting project. This series  was dedicated to Beirut, as a significant site in modern Arab culture. 

The accelerating development in Beirut draws a black fantasy on the possible transformation of Daliet el Raouche as the last undeveloped shore in Ras Beirut. A land mark that inscribed in the collective imagination in the modern Arab culture through movies from the second half of the 20th century. Abi Fawk Al-Shajarah 1969 was one of those movies where I borrowed some content.

Until 2017 my work engaged with the aesthetics and pessimistic narratives on the spacial shift in Palestine and some cases in the Arab Cities. Such work operated in moments of observation in Ramallah, Amman, Nablus, and Beirut.

The transformations I was stopped by have revealed political and economic forces behind them which also resulted by, or lead by, cultural shifts. The sociopolitical dynamics are not my concern in the work. My work relied on the aesthetics of transformation and the atmospheric pictures that I could generate on these narratives as psychological defensive mechanism. The subject matter, techniques and the relatively large scale of some works accommodated horizontal scenes as Landscape paintings with their kind of nature.