Organized into separate thematic keywords, this part represents the core of the exhibition. It displays posters according to recurrent subjects of communication across the different political factions and war phases: Belonging, Commemoration, Leadership and Martyrdom.
The exhibit reveals the weight each of these themes, and corresponding sub-themes, has held in the discursive frameworks of Lebanon's civil war. The thematic arrangement provides a comparative viewing of the signs and iconography across parties. It thus allows us to observe the antagonistic discourses and disparate visual representations around the same theme.
Signs of Conflict exhibition traces the deployment of political discourse in visual culture characteristic of Lebanon’s wartime conflict(s). It examines the political posters that were produced by the various warring factions, political parties and movements in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. It is premised upon the idea that the posters unfold the narratives of the prevailing political conflicts while providing insights into modern Arab visual culture.
Lebanon’s civil war is a complex case where local socio-economic and sectarian struggles, linked with regional politics, characterized political discourses and distinguished the numerous warring factions. That, in turn, materialized in the production of an equally complex plethora of political posters, with antagonistic discursive frameworks, conflicting significations, as well as distinct aesthetic practices.
