Karine Pierre’s work on Gaza Hospital (Lebanon) will be exposed at the Centre pour la photographie 8 septembre - 23 octobre 2022
Opening hours
8 -18 September everyday : 10:00 – 12:00 and 15:00 – 18:00 (except Friday 16th am)
19 -30 September : on appointment
Week-end 1-2 October : 10:00 – 12:00 and 15:00 – 18:00
3-21 October : on appointment
Week-end 22-23 October : 10:00 – 12:00 and 15:00 – 18:00
Contact : 06 47 32 65 22
Free entrance
The photographer
Laureate of the "Residence Prize for Photography" Fondation des Treilles
Laureate of the "Rencontres Photographiques des Amis du musée Albert-Kahn"
Finalist for the Roger Pic Prize
Finalist Lucas Dolega Award
Finalist IWPA Award
The work
GAZA HOSPITAL - SABRA - BEIRUT
Built in 1978 by the PLO, Gaza Hospital opened the following year in Sabra - West Beirut. In 1982, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society took over its management. The hospital offered high quality care free of charge to the entire population of Beirut. During the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the staff was evacuated and the facilities were heavily damaged. From 1985 to 1987, during the ’War of the Camps’, Gaza Hospital was targeted by the Shia Amal militia supported by the Syrian occupation. On January 16, 1988, Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal party, still in power today, announced the end of the siege of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. The Sixth Brigade
withdrew and was replaced by Syrian troops. In the meantime, the hospital will be completely dismantled and the facilities will be looted or destroyed. From the surgical blocks, through the electrical system to the elevators, nothing will be spared. All that will remain of the hospital is an empty shell to which Palestinians will flock to find a fragile refuge. Little by little, the hospital will shelter generations of Palestinian refugees, then Syrians escaping the conflicts, but also poor Lebanese workers as well as Egyptian, Moroccan and Bangladeshi migrants fleeing misery.
Gaza Hospital has thus become a condensation of the history of migratory flows in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. A palimpsest to be read within its verticality.
The former hospital, implanted on the edge of the city that was still proud until recently, was built in an overcrowded area with a large Sunni majority. Its ideological build, which was the struggle of a single people under the banner of the PLO, has mutated over the decades to become a concentration of regional and international pluralities, with no other primary motif than the one of survival. The same ones who partly constitute the population of Lebanon and who divide it, all refugees in this urban shred.
Enemies of yesterday for some, they now share the bone structure of the same dilapidated architecture with porous strata, combined by the necessities of extreme precariousness and promiscuity. There, transnational, sometimes transcultural families are formed by capillary action. In this perspective, Gaza Hospital proposes the iconography of a "sur-living" together, a society which, if it remains sometimes economically staggered, is gradually changing beyond origins and confessions. Here, the lines of demarcation that continue to fence off the country’s different communities in order to maintain a system of clientelism and corruption, fade away slightly, reminding us in a filigree but not without irony that once upon a time, this hospital was for everyone.
While the populations of Gaza Hospital are slowly moving towards a possible hospitality, the terrible economic crisis organized by the bankruptcy of a mortifying and discriminatory political system bequeaths to the poorest among them only one ’in common’, that of dying together, slowly.
© Karine Pierre. Reproduction of the photos is strictly forbidden.
karinepierre.photo@gmail.com
Tél. 06 63 69 71 21
https://hanslucas.com/kpierre/photo
Press release in French attached. Please get in touch with us at contact@centrephoto-gaillac.com - 06 47 32 65 22 - if you need further information.
