Queer Love, Everywhere: A Conversation with Omar Mismar
Omar Mismar, Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror, 2023, mosaic. 51 x 51 inches (130 × 130 cm). Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Gay love can be as strong as stones. The proof is Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror, a 2023 mosaic plate by Lebanese artist Omar Mismar depicting two men kissing. The piece is one of this year’s sensations at the Venice Biennale, and definitely the most talked about in the gay social media bubble. There is a reason for it. For the first time, a classical mosaic unapologetically captures the passion between two men. The choice of this old form casts a bridge enabling ancient Byzantine art to meet with modern-day Arab culture and contemporary sensibility.
Photo of Omar Mismar.
An international artist, Mismar, born in 1986, has always been political: his mosaic series, displayed at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, also addresses the Syrian Civil War and dictatorship. Past works of video art and photography reflected on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and bombings of Gaza. For instance, the stunning piece I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful I will not find this image beautiful (An unfinished monument) portrays a 2014 Israeli strike. Moreover, in 2016, the pictures of a group of athletes training amongst the ruins of the conflict inspired the study Exercises in Ruin (Bar Palestine) — a series about homoerotic beauty and grief amongst the rubbles of a Gaza neighborhood. Now, the artist focuses on the ancient Mediterranean art of mosaics, bringing classical imagery back to life in a blatant, unfiltered display of gay love.
“I did not encounter this particular moment of two men embracing and about to kiss in ancient art,” Mismar tells us on Google Meet, speaking from his home in Beirut. “I stumbled more upon scenes of a satyr and a nymph about to make love, or two men wrestling, and the wrestling positions could be read as sex positions. But I refer to this romantic, routine moment between lovers: holding one another about to lock lips.” The mosaic’s frame, with its intertwining pattern, says Mismar, foreshadows the kiss that is about to happen.
Omar Mismar, Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror, detail. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
Mismar’s works, on view at the exhibition’s venues of the Giardini and L’Arsenale, perfectly fit this year’s theme, “Foreigners everywhere,” and the claims — made by Brazilian curator, Adriano Pedrosa — of opening the doors to queerness in all its forms.
GDD: How does your work reflect queerness in Lebanese culture?
OM: Being gay is punishable by law in Lebanon. Nonetheless, queer people have existed and will continue to exist under different circumstances, levels of oppression, and obscurity.
If you look at Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror, you can see that the pieces of stones of the faces are reshuffled so that you cannot really tell who these two men are. It looks like a violent gesture: why was the face distorted? Did it get hit? But hiding the face is also a strategy people use to protect themselves. It doesn't just apply to the Lebanese context. Some people choose to remain anonymous, or pixelate their images online for fear of persecution.
GDD: If there is violence in the composition, is there also nature?
OM: In a sense, yes. Thinking about the medium of the mosaic as natural adds another layer to the scene depicted.
Then, there is the term unidentified in the title. It refers to the violence against queer people, which is internalized in intimate moments that we have. For instance, when you are standing in front of a mirror, what you see could reflect the feelings that you are being forced to have.
Omar Mismar at L’Arsenale, Venice Biennale. Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
But on the other hand, it also borrows the language of archaeology. We might never know who these two lovers were, but we are certain that queer love has passed through.
GDD: Are you saying that the piece also refers to how queer love has been at times canceled from history?
OM: Yes, but if we look closely, we will find these moments. Usually, homoeroticism in mosaics is read obliquely, you know, like in scenes such as men doing sports, wrestling, or assuming other forms.
This oblique reading, when we recognize a homoerotic moment in an animal jumping over another animal, is wonderful and necessary because it is at the heart of queering. But I also missed a non-oblique kind of in-your-face moment where homoeroticism is not hinted at, but rather celebrated and portrayed without shame and without the codes of myth or symbolism.
GDD: There is a fierceness to your mosaic.
OM: Probably this fierceness comes from its unabashed assertion of this moment of queer love.
GDD: On a more political note, coming from a Lebanese background, your work contradicts Israel's claim of being the only place for queerness in the Middle East. What do you think of it?
OM: Israel's strategy of advertising itself as the only gay haven in the Middle East is a piece of propaganda and pinkwashing to cover for a settler colonial project, as an excuse to commit genocide against what it considers the more conservative, crude, homophobic neighboring countries.
There's a wonderful article on Parapraxis by Hussein Omar titled Homo Zion where he talks of pinkwashing as a way of erasing colonial history.
We know that queerness can exist everywhere, even in places you cannot fully express it. The settler colonial project is precisely monopolizing a version of queerness as its own and as the only one. But that does not mean that queerness doesn’t exist in these different parts of the Middle East or in other ways. We've been queering for such a long time.
You can see the work within this kind of political discourse in that it affirms and celebrates queer love in its own way: in the act of obscuring and protecting the identity of these two lovers, in the act of playing with this meaning of passing unidentified. Within this set of limitations, it still celebrates and portrays a queer romantic moment.
GDD: This year’s Biennale marked a shift from the past, as it gave more space to queer, BIPOC, and artists from the Global South. Were you happy with it?
OM: I liked the pairing of my work with Teresa Margolles' work at the Giardini. It's a heavy, somber room with Teresa's canvas holding the marks of a young, killed migrant (Tela Venezuelana, 2019, ed.). It interacts well with my mosaic blanket, Spring Cleaning (2022), which is also a symbol of displacement and refugee-hood.
Teresa Margolles’ Tela Venezuelana, 2019. Human imprint on cloth, 82.6 x 82.6 inches (210 × 210 cm, on the wall) and Omar Mismar, Spring Cleaning, from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2022. Mosaic, 78.7 x 86.6 inches (200 × 220 cm). Photo: Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
These blankets are common in my region. They used to be manufactured in Syria a long time ago. Refugees often carry them because they're thick but light and provide warmth. And in the springtime in Beirut, people would put them on the balcony to ventilate them. Moreover, images coming from Gaza showing these blankets used as walls and covers for bodies or body parts add meaning to the piece.
In the Arsenale, most of my mosaics come from my 2019-2020 series. In Ahmad and Akram Protecting Hercules, for instance, two guys are protecting with sandbags a mosaic of Hercules. This is based on an image shared with me by Abou Farid, one of the men involved in the preservation efforts at the Maarat al-Numan Museum in Syria, a mosaics museum that was being attacked by the regime.
Omar Mismar, Ahmad and Akram Protecting Hercules, from the series Studies in Mosaics, 2019-20. Mosaic 51 x 78.7 inches (130 × 200 cm). Photo: Marco Zorzanello. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia.
GDD: This year’s Biennale was titled Foreigners Everywhere. Did you feel like a foreigner while you were there?
OM: No, I didn’t, but these two ideas of the stranger and the parasite have been my modi operandi. I refer to Georg Simmel, the sociologist, and Jean-Luc Nancy, the philosopher, in considering the stranger's ability to be an element of the group but also being outside and confronting it: a synthesis of remoteness and nearness. I think of the stranger as someone who never stops being an intrusion and never ceases to arrive.
I believe that one can reclaim foreignness as a practice of poiesis (of creation, ed.), of making, and of making strange, while fighting foreignness as a discriminatory reality and paranoid rhetoric. You could see my work as a window into these different ways of being foreigners, of being queer, of fighting back, of building a community.You
Omar Mismar’s works are on view at Venice Biennale until November 24, 2024.
The interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
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