WORKS ON PAPER - 2016

Works on Paper is a series of artist interventions published in four Lebanese newspapers – Assafir, Al Akhbar, The Daily Star, and L’Orient Le Jour. Together with the Temporary Art Platform (TAP), APEAL commissioned 12 local artists to reflect upon the potential and the physicality of the newspaper as a space for public engagement.

The results appeared in the four participating newspapers on the last Saturday of April, May and June in 2016.

The newspaper is a coming together of content and form. The interventions reconsidered the associations the public may have of this popular, everyday “space”.

Once printed, the interventions permitted the public to claim ownership of each work as a tangible object that they could alter, use and respond to in other ways, in the process changing, challenging and responding the medium itself. As in one sense newspapers ‘reinvent’ themselves every day, the art projects gave new life to their content and form.

The broader media distribution channels gave the artworks access to an audience wider than the conventional realm of the arts, creating greater potential for community engagement.