The Return text

The Return, 2023

The Return is an immersive installation that completely transforms the vast exhibition space of Sfeir-Semler Beirut, turning it into a foreign stratosphere. Stepping into the gallery, visitors are immediately bathed in a blue haze that engulfs objects and people alike and magically transforms their appearances. After the eyesight has adjusted to the dimmed setting, one distinguishes awe-inspiring, larger-than-life images of a bull’s head, that look like reliefs on a series of 8 symmetrically built free-standing walls.

The marble piece depicting a Bull’s Head, discovered by French archeologist and Ancient Near East specialist Maurice Dunand, spent millennia buried and undisturbed, but within the timespan of half a century, between 1967 and 2017, it moved from Saida to Byblos, disappeared for over three decades, reappeared in Colorado USA and was ultimately hidden in plain sight, within a display in the Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Fifty years after it emerged back, a court case to establish its rightful owner brought it to the spotlight. The case hinged on whether four photographs taken in 1967 by Dunand’s team, and four other photographs taken in 2017 by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, were pictures of the same object.