Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon- Anachar Basbous
Author AUB artgalleries
This video is part of the exhibition "Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon", curated by Octavian Esanu at the AUB Art Gallery.
From the beginning, certain roles in the art world have been firmly established: the artist produced, and the art collector bought or accumulated out of enjoyment, compulsion, concern for cultural heritage, or with the noble intention of showing the artwork to the public. Before the emergence of curatorship as a profession, it was often the art collector who exhibited the artist, acting as a lens through which the product of artistic labor was projected onto the public realm. For this event at AUB Art Gallery, we decided to turn this lens around. Profiles: Collecting Art in Lebanon shines a spotlight directly on the figure of the collector and on the practice of art collecting.
To provide a wider picture of the collecting of art in Lebanon we have interviewed a number of prominent Lebanese collectors and displayed the results on monitors on the upper floor of the gallery. Rather than provide a comprehensive account of existing collecting practices in Lebanon, we reveal certain established types: the private collector; the bank as collector; non-profit collectors; collectors who started from scratch and collectors who inherited their collections.
Anachar Basbous opened his sculpture studio in Rachana (Batroun, North Lebanon) after graduating from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d'Art in Paris. In Rachana he established the Michel Basbous Foundation----a free open-air sculpture gallery and garden that permanently exhibits the work of Michel Basbous. Anachar Basbous has been taking care of the Basbous collection, which consists for the most part of granite, bronze, metal and wood sculptures as well as of drawings. In addition to preserving the collection and continuing his own artistic practice, also on display in the garden, Anachar Basbous regularly organizes a sculpture symposium in Rachana.
In this interview, Anachar Basbous speaks about caring for the Michel Basbous Collection.
