Joanna Raad, ONCE UPON A TIME IN WEST BEIRUT

Joanna Raad is a scenographer, painter, and researcher. She joined AUB as a lecturer in the faculty of arts and art history. She obtained her PhD in Theater, her Masters in Cinema, and a Bachelor in performing arts from Saint-Joseph University in Beyrouth (USJ). She has conceived and executed more than 120 projects (TV series, short films, music videos, and plays) and three solo painting exhibitions.
As a researcher, she is a member of the Kandinsky Library in the Pompidou center in Paris. Her research interests are oriented towards scenography, history of modern art; the correspondences between theater and painting, cinema and painting, and the abstraction in dance.

After several years of research, Joanna choses to focus the theme of her artworks on childhood and visual memories. In a naïve and neo expressionist style, she creates vivid compositions of colors, documenting and reconstructing the past in a modern way.

In the exhibition, she shares her autobiography in a naive/neo-expressionist style. All starts with obsessive flashbacks doodled on recycled paper with oil pastels. It was mainly drawing from memory. Photos were rare at that time and she was more interested anyway to reconstitute mental images rather than depicting reality. The oil pastel drawings were then organized by locations: The house of Teta Marie, the Parents home, the Collège Protestant Français etc. The vivid colors echoed with childhood. She chose Zico House because the architecture of the building and the exhibition space echoes with the houses where she lived. Reconstruction of the past and the building of archives were a trigger for her artistic research.