ŠamaŠ
Soleil Noir Soleil

The artist, Zad Moultaka

“In our civilization, which is lost on the shores of materialism and drowns on the surface of the visible, it is imperative and urgent to question the sacred in the very heart of man. The project of the Lebanese pavilion for the Venice Biennale is at the center of this questioning through a spatial, temporal and sound dialogue between Ur in Iraq, Beirut in Lebanon and Aleppo in Syria, places of terrible past and present violence and all of symbolic power of the Middle East.
It will take place in the old civil and military shipyard of the Venetian fleet.
ŠamaŠ is rooted mentally, physically and philosophically in the rejection of the drama we are witnessing in this solar region of the world that is the Middle East, cradle of both Eastern and Western civilizations. The Arab apocalypse, which threatens to end these civilizations, is not inevitable. Under the bombarded skies of Syria, one can still glimpse the emergence of the first codes of Babylonian laws and the desire for a wild peace. The man of today was torn to the ground, he came off the sky. Deaf and blind to the essence of things, he programs his own self-effacement, precipitating with him, out of anguish, the crumbling of the world … ”

Lamentation on the ruin of Ur

The blood of the country, like bronze and lead, accumulates;
his dead melt themselves like fat in the sun;
his men, who annihilate the ax, have no helmet to protect them;
like a gazelle trapped, they lie down,
the mouth in the dust …
Mothers and fathers who do not leave their house
are covered by fire;
the children, lying in the lap of their mother,
as fish are swept away by the waters …
May this disaster be completely destroyed!
Like the big gate of the night,
can the door be closed on him!
Excerpt from 11 songs, 2000 BC

64 loudspeakers will broadcast this prayer ŠamaŠ  Itima (Dark Sun)
for mixed choir 32 voices a cappella & electronics

Sumerian hymn to the Sun sung in Akkadian

by the Choir of Antonine University-Lebanon

direction Toufic Maatouk
electronic part signed Zad Moultaka and Gilbert Nouno,
with the active participation of Ircam

The curator, Emmanuel Daydé

Haunted by the idea of linking the two shores of East and West in one voice, Zad Moultaka erected in the former Military Arsenal of Venice a plastic and musical monument in ŠamaŠ, the god of the sun and the sea. justice of the Babylonians, represented on the Code of Hammurabi, a high black stele engraved almost 4,000 years ago, considered as the first table of laws. Who is ŠamaŠ today? Who is this savage god whom we worship, who multiplies blind violence and sends millions of men on the roads of the world? Who is this god but the god of carnage, “the only one who has ruled unchallenged since the dawn of time”? To represent the prevailing law, Moultaka brings forth a jet engine Rolls Royce Avon Mk209, a twilight relic of a collapsing world, the chanting of the Lamentation of Ur, a prayer addressed by the children in the furnace to a sacred bones torn from the god of carnage. The destruction of Beirut yesterday, that of Aleppo today – and that of another city in the Middle East tomorrow – calls again the shouts and whispers of the complaint of Ur, that we cried there is 4000 years before the wall of the devastated city of Abraham. By singing a monumental bomber engine “driving ruler of all things”, surrounding it with 32 implacant and threatening loudspeakers – who chant in a Akkadian phantom the ancient Hymn to ŠamaŠ – and leaning against a sparkling wall of 150,000 coins – evoking the power of the Golden Calf – Zad Moultaka tries to stave off the Arab apocalypse prophesied by the poet Etel Adnan. If art can not fight against the erosion of the world, it remains this place where we can reinvent it: ŠamaŠ is also a palindrome, which oscillates between justice and injustice. Only to light the day.

Everything revolves around the sun, god of justice, among the ancient Babylonians

« “When you appear, Shamash, the people bow down;
All people everywhere are bowing to you!
You shine in the darkness, and you hold the reins of Heaven!
Your glory has covered the most distant mountains,
Your radiance has filled the face of the Earth!
Your glorious rising illuminates the existence of men:
All are turning to Your wonderful shine!
Like an immense blaze, You illuminate the world … “»