From Beirut to Paris, from Cairo to Istanbul, and throughout Africa and Gaza, this retrospective touches on places where the artist has left part of himself behind. The Lebanese artist and photographer Fouad Elkhoury, born in 1952, forms a pictorial autobiography that extends across different cultures. With a 40-year-old career behind him, Elkhoury has remained faithful to silver film and, until recently, to black and white photographs.

His technique conveys an impression of timelessness and brings us out of reality to an indistinct universe, between fiction and truth (‘What Happened to my Dreams?’ is the title of Elkhoury’s latest work). Elkhoury started his career as a photojournalist – he depicted Beirut during the Civil War – but instinctively denounced the capacity of media to manipulate, deform and ‘pirate’ images. These are the same documentary images that he revisited and questioned during his life.

One of the co-founders of The Arab Image Foundation, the photographer never really made a choice between reality and dreams, but found a link between them: in his work, each fiction reveals a true event, and each fantasy holds a part of history. For example, one of his shots of a stony road taken in Mozambique is entitled ‘Gaza’. Another one, in which one can recognise Berlin’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews in Europe, is titled ‘Palestine 2048’. Presenting facts is not the main ambition of Elkhoury’s shots, but rather to explore the collective unconscious.

His choice of subjects is eclectic. He has produced series on Marseille, Rome and Djibouti’s urban landscapes, portraits of Egyptian movie stars and the photographic diary ‘On War and Love’ that followed the summer 2006 war in Lebanon. Elkhoury often photographs the poor, as well as those in the margins of society. His landscapes are mysterious and insistent, evoking an accumulation of emotional traumas.

His portraits, often subtitled with English texts, tell peripheral stories rather than revealing anything about the life of the model: Elkhoury’s photos always serve as a support for speech. And above all things, war is omnipresent in his work: it turns life into a provisional condition, it blurs the outlines, and suggests pain and destruction behind each picture. In ‘Civil War’ (1977- 1986), Elkhoury presents a series of black and white and colour photographs taken in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, successively violent (‘Body rescued’, 1982) or melancholic (‘The hairdresser’, 1982), which are divided into five chronological sections each highlighting important dates from the conflict.

The series ‘Sombres’ (2001-2002) juxtaposes images from different parts of the world, such as architectural pictures and portraits of people from London, Cairo and Benares with a set of images showing Beirut in the aftermath of the civil war. Elkhoury’s intrepid travels are also presented in the rare series ‘Monologues’, an array of images from different countries and cultures displaying what he terms ‘itinerancies’. ‘Atlantis’ documents the head of the PLO’s escape from Beirut by sea, revealing an intimate and often unseen side of Arafat.

In ‘Palestine (1993-1995)’, the artist settles down to document the everyday life struggle of humble people under the Israeli occupation, while ‘Civilization, Fake = Real?’, a study on Dubai’s oversized architecture, depicts a civilization of contradictions in the process of boom and formation. ‘Time Monologues’ mixes moving and still images as an experiential study on the passing of time, while ‘Moments’ projects images accompanied by music, exploring Elkhoury’s journey in Egypt in the footsteps of Gustave Flaubert.

Mon-Sat 12noon-8pm. Until Oct 1.

Author: Florence Thireau