This Bulletin accompanies Rayyane Tabet's site-specific installation, which responds to four carved stone reliefs from the ancient site of Tell Halaf, in modern Syria. Now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ancient carvings traveled here under the aegis of the World War I–era Alien Property Act. Approaching this complex history from three perspectives, the text includes a historical discussion of the reliefs—from ancient times to their journey to The Met—by Kim Benzel, Curator in Charge of The Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art; a personal account by Rayyane Tabet that chronicles the experiences of his great-grandfather, who worked for Max von Oppenheim, the original excavator of Tell Halaf; and an essay that explores Tabet's installation in the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic practice by Clare Davies, Assistant Curator in The Met's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Tabet's work and the three narratives presented in the Bulletin highlight the entangled, complex histories of cultural artifacts in museum collections while emphasizing their power to educate audiences about the ancient world. The Met's connection to Tell Halaf and its artifacts surfaces important contemporary conversations about the evolving role of encyclopedic museums. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

A travers une pratique sculpturale et narrative, Rayyane Tabet s'interroge sur les paradoxes de l'histoire et explore le lien entre le majeur et le mineur, le récit officiel et les histoires personnelles, réactivant des événements culturels du passé qui ont été soumis à l'oubli. Le projet « Fragments » se concentre sur l'histoire du site syrien de Tell Halaf, découvert par le diplomate et orientaliste allemand Max von Oppenheim. L'arrière-grand-père de Tabet, Faek Borkhoche, travailla pendant six mois comme secrétaire d'Oppenheim lors de son expédition de 1929. Tabet emprunte à la pratique d'un archéologue, reconstruisant les vestiges matériels du temple de Halaf, frottant des pierres de basalte, assemblant des fragments de tapis et des tentes militaires. Les souvenirs personnels, transformés et abstraits, permettent de rendre compte de relations historiques et géopolitiques complexes, renvoyant au contexte des mouvements migratoires et de la guerre en Syrie.

On December 2nd 1950 the first drop of Saudi oil arrived to 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 kilometers passing through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria to end in Lebanon had required 3 years of planning and surveying, 2 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 that crosses the border of five political entities in a region that is very conscious of its demarcated lines. Over the past five years I have undergone an in depth research of the pipeline and the company that ran it. This project proposes to take the material gathered over these years and develop a series of objects, installation, performances and books that uses the Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company as both their conceptual and physical framework, a specter through which to address the economic, political, geographic and social transformations of the region from the end of World War II onwards.