1999/2000 | Art in detention / Camp de Khiam / Sud Liban – Paris

Khiam detention center in Israeli occupied south Lebanon was created in 1985 following the establishment of the Ansar 1 and Ansar 2 prisons camps, where thousands of Lebanese, Palestinians, political dissidents and simply innocent victims were detained arbitrarily since the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in 1978. Those persons imprisoned in this camp were essentially the local population refusing to cooperate or collaborate with the Israeli mandated army of South Lebanon (SLA). These individuals were victims of illegal arrest, brutal interrogations, torture, and were then thrown into minute cells of this ancient citadel, where forgotten, they sometimes endured long years of detention. The conditions of the Khiam detention center were abominable, and those imprisoned there were without any civil or human rights and without any legal due process or judgment. Khiam is synonymous with all that can be described as “arbitrary”, secret. One hundred and forty four individuals (the majority Lebanese) of which 2 children, 5 women, (two young women, one woman journalist, an elderly 68 year old woman and one other, a mother of 4 children…), and very old and very seriously ill individuals were arbitrarily detained at Khiam. At the age of 21, Soha Bechara was arrested, tortured and thrown into the prison without a trial and spent 10 years in Khiam, 6 of which she spent in solitary confinement in a cell measuring 80 centimeters x 180 centimeters. Soha Bechara was liberated on the 3rd of September 1998 thanks to an international human rights campaign.

The exhibition of “art in detention” shows this vital need to create in the most inhuman and insupportable circumstances…The need to exist through these simple handmade works of art. In creating these modest and unpretentious artistic objects and even inventing the materials to make them, the body and soul keeps in perpetual motion, and keeps hope alive in the absence of loved ones and friends. With an absolute minimum or total lack of (in most cases) traditional means and materials at their disposal, the prisoners in Khiam succeeded in defying their tormentors and with this extreme form of civil disobedience, managed to preserve their humanity and their integrity.

These truly moving works of art were presented alongside the replica of an isolation cell, documents on the camp, pictures by Josée Lambert and the detainees’ families, as well as a testimonial film by Jayce Salloum entitled « Up to the South ».