In the latest exhibition from Ramzi Mallat (Instagram), Suspended Disbelief, you’ll find yourself somewhere between myth and modernity, faith and fabrication, superstition and spectacle. Hosted at Takeover Beirut (Instagram) until April 12, this immersive installation delves into the perennial tension between belief and doubt—transforming the evil eye, that omnipresent Mediterranean talisman, into both a beacon of protection and an agent of unease.
For Ramzi Mallat, the act of believing is as much about surrender as it is about control. “While people fear what they do not understand, nothing can exist in someone’s mind if they do not believe in it,” he muses. This dialectic plays out across his latest body of work, where history’s artifacts are reanimated and distorted, refusing to settle neatly into the past or the present.
At the heart of Suspended Disbelief is Constellations of Protection (2023-ongoing), a series of suspended bronze sculptures that nod to the enigmatic ‘Eye Complex’ artifacts unearthed in Tell Brak, Syria. These pieces hover between reverence and ruin, exuding both an ancient resilience and a contemporary fragility. Meanwhile, his Vista Visions (2024-ongoing) takes on a new life as a wallpaper installation, its hypnotic repetition skewing depth perception and challenging the certainty of the gaze.
It is precisely this idea of vision—the act of seeing and being seen—that underpins the exhibition. The evil eye, an age-old symbol of spiritual defense, becomes a tool of distortion. Is it watching over us, or are we trapped in its gaze? The setting of Takeover Beirut, an artist-run space dedicated to experimental interventions, only amplifies this tension. “By embracing experimentation, it challenged me as an artist to respond within the constraints of the given space and the urgency imposed by the volatility of Lebanon’s socio-political situation,” Mallat explains.
There’s something deeply cinematic about the way Suspended Disbelief unfolds. It’s as if the artist has orchestrated a mise-en-scène where viewers play both protagonist and observer, caught in a world where certainty is an illusion. And like any great illusionist, Mallat never fully reveals his hand. Instead, he invites us to waver, to question, to stare back at the work until it begins staring into us.
Suspended Disbelief is a proposition—one that asks us to reconsider the invisible forces that shape our realities. In a city like Beirut, where resilience and instability dance a never-ending waltz, belief isn’t just an act of faith; it’s an art form in itself.
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