Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a writer, art critic and independent researcher based in Italy. His work focuses on the history of archaeology, contemporary art and the politics of memory in the Middle East.
The events of April 13, 1975—commonly referred to as the Beirut Bus Massacre—marked the start of brief but deadly armed clashes between Christian Phalangist and Palestinian militants. The violence began with an altercation outside a church in East Beirut between members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Phalangist Kataeb Party, escalating later that day with an ambush on a bus carrying Palestinian and Lebanese supporters of both sides returning from a political rally. This date is traditionally marked as the flashpoint that ignited Lebanon's 15-year civil war.
But pinpointing the origins of a conflict with such deep and tangled roots to a single event has always been a matter of contention. Ask five Lebanese when the war started, and they may share five different answers: One may begin with the Druze-Maronite conflict of 1860, another during the French mandate, others with the 1948 Palestinian Nakba or the 1958 crisis that first saw American soldiers deployed to Lebanon. Some insist that the Phalangist attack was retaliation for an assassination attempt against Kataeb's party leader and Lebanese President Bachir Pierre Gemayel by Palestinian militants. Others argue it was premeditated, meant to spark a wider conflict.
In his recent book "Beyrouth, 13 Avril 1975" (2024), journalist Marwan Chahine suggests the truth may have been far more chaotic—less a calculated strike than a confrontation sparked by "trigger-happy young men," capturing the surreal randomness that often accompanies the onset of war.
A new exhibition in Beirut, titled "50 Years of Déjà-Vu," presented at the non-profit UMAM Documentation & Research in Beirut, revisits this contested 50-year anniversary since the bus attack—not to memorialize it, but to interrogate it. The show poses a difficult question: "How do we archive what has not yet ended?" In a country where an official Amnesty Law passed in 1991 precludes public war memorials, this exhibition functions as a counter-archive—one that resists fixed narratives in favor of porous, evolving memory.
Through the work of four Lebanese artists—Lamia Joreige, Alfred Tarazi, Talal Khoury and Houssam Boukeili, the exhibition explores the elusive boundary between historical beginnings and endings. In a context where the threat of violence is constantly actualized and the historical archive is but an extension of the present, these works ask us to reconsider how we document, remember and understand the past.
Lamia Joreige's long-running project, "Objects of War" (1999-ongoing), exemplifies this approach. In it, participants chose an object to serve as a starting point for narrating their war-time experiences—effectively creating an act of collective memory. No two memories are alike, emphasizing the impossibility of a unified account.
In the project's first video, completed in 1999, Joreige assembled the testimonies of 11 people—including Lebanese politician Samir Frangieh, artist Akram Zaatari and curator Zeina Arida, among others—to create a polyphonic account. Over two decades, many additional unedited testimonies were introduced into the work.
"When I started recording testimonies in 1999," Joreige told us, "Enough time had passed since the official end of the war, for people to reflect on their experience and look back at it with a certain distance." Yet an overlap with the present proved unavoidable.
"The Israeli attack and siege of summer 2006 happened while I was working on Objects of War #4," Joreige recounted. "Some testimonies speak for both the civil war and the 2006 war, like artist Mazen Kerbaj, who speaks of his experience of the war as a child then, and in 2006 as an adult and parent."
A new exhibition in Beirut, titled "50 Years of Déjà-Vu," presented at the non-profit UMAM Documentation & Research in Beirut, revisits this contested 50-year anniversary since the bus attack—not to memorialize it, but to interrogate it.
- Arie Amaya-Akkermans
Alfred Tarazi's monumental 12-meter collage, "The Lovers: Body and Land" (2019), charts the rise and fall of Beirut from its modernization in the 1860s to its near destruction by the Israeli army in 1982. Anchored in the stories of Georgina Rizk, Miss Universe 1971, and Ali Hassan Salameh, the PLO's Chief of Security, the piece weaves together two intertwined threads: sexual liberation and Palestinian resistance.
"Let us consider the archive as a repository of knowledge, whatever that knowledge is," Tarazi reflects. "An archive only turns into knowledge once it is activated, be it through artistic practice or scholarly work."
The problematic nature of archives in Lebanon is central to UMAM's mission. Founded in 2005 as a public resource focusing on Lebanon's conflict, UMAM is now a repository of documents from the country's past. The precarity of the present archive was not lost on the organizers. In 2021, one of UMAM's co-founders, Lokman Mohsen Slim—an outspoken activist and political commentator—was assassinated in southern Lebanon. A judge suspended the investigation in 2024, citing a lack of new leads.
The same judge was subsequently removed from the case for obstruction of justice. The case was reopened in May, with a new hearing scheduled for June 12. Yet that same week, the outbreak of the Israel-Iran War forced UMAM to close the exhibition for the summer.
Filmmaker Ayman Nahle, the curator and organizer of the exhibition, sees this confluence of events as emblematic of a deeper crisis:
"How do you archive a war that hasn't truly ended? The present becomes the archive the moment we recognize its fragility. When violence becomes so repetitive and normalized, the act of archiving itself becomes a form of resistance. In Fifty Years of Déjà-Vu, we resisted static commemorations and turned to images, performances and installations as acts of counter-memory. Not all archives are institutional; some are emotional, spatial, photographic, or oral. Some are scars on bodies or bullet holes on lamp posts. The urgency today is not just to preserve what has happened, but to keep asking: Who is framing it, how and to what end?"
As the memory of the civil war recedes, eclipsed by ongoing regional catastrophes—from the Syrian political transition after its long civil war to the Beirut port blast and the genocide in Gaza to the Israeli attacks on Lebanon—Nahle insists that Lebanon's past has not been overwritten, but reactivated.
"The memory of the Lebanese civil war today does not operate in isolation; it echoes and intersects with the devastating realities unfolding around us. If anything, these larger regional catastrophes in Syria, Palestine and Gaza, alongside the repeated Israeli aggressions, do not overshadow Lebanon's past—they expose its continuity. The war in Lebanon is often spoken of as if it ended or was a closed chapter, but as the exhibition suggests, it never truly did."
"The fact that we still mark April 13 each year, while no date has ever been set to mark the war's end, reveals this unresolvedness."
