2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageWater is Never Still: Ruminations on water politics & poetics in Lebanon
Heather M. O'Brien-Takahashi
Friday, March 20 - 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Atlanta 2
An 'opia' is a condition of sight, or the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable—pupils glittering, opaque and endless. Opia builds photographic installations that consider the Lacanian difference between the 'gaze' and the 'look'. This presentation also draws from Laura Mulvey's concept of male gaze in visual culture, from the patriarchal militaristic fetish to re-framing voyeurism of the female body.
Opia will present research and their multi-media installation, water is never still. The work is in collaboration w/ The Arab Image Foundation & examines photographic archives from the late 1800s -1960s of various dams, rivers, & seaside locals within Lebanon, where Opia was based from 2016-2021. The project explores how water has been used as a tool of social control and reveals the multi-layered and controversial histories of the privatization of water in Beirut by tracing the source of the photographers' water to their home in the Hamra neighborhood. The piece unravels the stories of feminist activists who fought for water rights throughout the Lebanese Civil War through a series of letters, archival photographs and a voice that speaks to citizens of the future.
The presentation immerses the viewer into the filmmakers' Ottoman-era sun-drenched flat, one of few left after the Lebanese Civil War. The work questions the misplaced anxieties of what it means to grow up in a post-9/11 image landscape & to live and work in Lebanon during the 2019 revolution/economic collapse and to give birth during the 2020 Beirut explosion. Images confront this rhetoric and conditioned fear by including archival photographs from The Arab Image Foundation that depict water throughout Lebanese history alongside contemporary drone footage of Lebanon's Chouf forest and their recent election. Nuanced moments draw inward, de-centering the authorial lens, intentionally shifting how mediated images affect one's community.
speaker
Heather O'Brien-Takahashi
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