Period
2008 - 2011
Proposed by
Sarah Rifky
Location
Beirut
About the project
On December 2nd 1950, the first drop of Saudi oil arrived in Lebanon via the newly constructed Trans-Arabian Pipeline, the world’s longest pipeline and the largest American private investment in a foreign land. The 30inch wide structure, which spanned 1213 kilometres passing through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria to end in Lebanon, had required three years of planning and surveying, two years of installation, the fabrication of 256,000 tons of steel tubes, the employment of 30,000 workers, the ratification of a few national and international laws, the invention of new transportation and communication devices, and a CIA backed political coup 33 years later, on December 28th 1983, the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Oil Company announced that it was terminating its operations and, by January 1984, the pipeline was abandoned.
Today it sits hidden six feet underground, the only physical object crossing the border of five political entities in a region conscious of its demarcated lines. As the forgotten construction of a defunct oil corporation that was part of the landscape of the Middle East for more than 60 years, the pipeline is no longer a utilitarian tool that circulates resources but can be transformed into a storytelling device capable of proposing an alternative way of travelling the region and understanding its development.
Over the past four years, I have undergone in-depth research of the pipeline and the company that ran it. Research has taken me on a journey which went from interviewing previous employees of the company spread across the globe to surveying the abandoned terminal station in South Lebanon, and from gathering paraphernalia found in the company’s destroyed headquarters in Beirut to accidentally coming across, in the stacks of Georgetown University, a language training manual published by the company to teach its American employees how to speak colloquial Arabic.
The project Diary of a Sheep: The Rise and Fall of an Oil Company proposes to take the material gathered over these years and develop a series of videos and objects that uses the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company as both their conceptual and physical framework, a spectre through which to address the economic, political, geographic and social transformations of the region from the end of World War II onwards. Based on the documents, photographs, objects, anecdotes, events, drawings, and footage gathered during the research surrounding the conception, development and subsequent demise of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company, this project proposes to develop a series of eleven characters that tell the story of the pipeline from various angles. These accounts, which incorporate found material within a fictional treatment, become vignettes in the form of short videos and accompanying props that follow the arc of one corporation against the backdrop of the shifting terrain of the Middle East.
External links
About the artist
Rayyane Tabet (1983, Ashqout, Lebanon) explores stories that offer an alternative understanding of major socio-political events through individual narratives. Informed by his training in architecture and sculpture, his work investigates paradoxes in the built environment and its history by way of installations that reconstitute the perception of physical and temporal distance.
In recent years, Tabet has had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021), Sharjah Art Foundation (2021), Storefront New York (2020), Parasol Unit Foundation of Contemporary Art London (2019), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019), Louvre, Paris (2019), Carée d’Art Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nimes (2018) and at the Kunstverein, Hamburg (2017). He took part in numerous international group shows, among which the Whitney Biennial (2022), Yohama Triennial (2020), Lahore Biennial (2020), Jameel Art Center (2018), 21st Sydney Biennial (2018), Manifesta 12 (2018), 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017) and the 32nd Sao Paolo Biennial (2016).
