A film created as part of Daniels Faculty architecture grad Batoul Faour’s thesis project two years ago is currently on view in a group show at Ottawa’s SAW art centre.

Faour, who has also been working as a sessional instructor at the Faculty since January 2022, graduated from the post-professional Master of Architecture program in 2021. That same year, she was awarded the Avery Review Essay Prize for her treatise on how architectural glass exacerbated the damage from the August 2020 port explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.

Faour’s thesis project comprised both the prize-winning essay and a film that she screened during the final review. The film, titled Shafāfiyyāh, which means transparency in Arabic, is one of the works being presented at SAW in the group show Beirut: Eternal Recurrence.

Co-curated by Daniels Faculty sessional lecturer Amin Alsaden, the exhibition features the work of about a dozen international contemporary artists, its title taken from a text by theorist-artist Jalal Toufic on the philosophical notion of “eternal recurrence.” The show proposes that time and events repeat themselves in an infinite loop—a concept especially resonant in the long-suffering Lebanese capital.

“The participating artists do not necessarily pass judgment about Beirut, its repetitions or how coming to terms with the cyclicality of certain phenomena could perhaps create a new consciousness that might begin to change the course of history,” the exhibition’s curators note. “But to observe their replications is to recognize parallels between a past and a future entangled in a difficult present.”

In her thesis project, Faour examines how both the narrative and material lifecycles of glass are entangled in Beirut’s history and politics.

In her essay and her film, she notes how, after the 2020 explosion, “Beirut’s windows and streets have become palimpsests of broken glass, telling of generational cycles of sectarian violence in a country still ruled by the same warlords who tore the city apart decades ago, erased their traces, and disguised this history in a dysfunctional present normality.”

In addition to disseminating her research among a wider audience, the exhibition, Faour says, is a great example for current students of alumni pursuing “alternative trajectories beyond commercial practice.”

Beirut: Eternal Recurrence, which opened on July 15, runs until September 23. SAW is located at 67 Nicholas Street just north of the University of Ottawa.

Top image of hand organizing pieces of glass: still from film by Batoul Faour. (Below) Exhibition images by Ava Margueritte.