Eight ancient glass vessels shattered in the 2020 Beirut explosion are going on display at the British Museum today, walking visitors through the painstaking international project to piece them back together.
The vessels, from the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods, were reconstructed at the world-famous museum’s conservation laboratories, and will be shown as part of its “Shattered Glass of Beirut” showcase, before returning to Lebanon later this year.
“(It) tells a story of near destruction and recovery, of resilience and collaboration,” said Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum.
Photo: AFP
The vessels were among 74 contained within a case at the American University in Beirut (AUB). The case fell over when the shockwave of the port blast, which occurred three kilometres away on August 4, 2020, hit the building, smashing the glass objects inside.
A team of experts had the daunting task of sorting every shard of glass, deciding if it was part of an ancient vessel, rather than display case, and which vessel it belonged to, Duygu Camurcuoglu, a senior conservator at the British Museum, said.
“It’s all pretty much done by hand or by eye — brainwork basically. You have to know certain techniques to be able to carry out this work,” she added.
Once the pieces had been sorted, the conservators began the mammoth jigsaw-puzzle exercise of reassembling the vessels.
“It’s a case of using an adhesive to reconstruct the vessels,” said Camurcuoglu. But they could not just use anything.
“We don’t use superglue, we don’t use UHU,” she joked.
The most challenging vessels were the “large dish and the Byzantine pitcher,” Camurcuoglu recalled.
Eighteen of the vessels have so far been conserved as part of an emergency recovery campaign in Beirut, along with the eight vessels at the British Museum and two that emerged unscathed from the fall. Experts hope that at least half of the remaining 46 objects in Beirut can be conserved soon too.
The collaborative project between the British Museum and the AUB’s Archaeological Museum began last year, following an offer of help from the London institution.
Conservators agreed early on to make the vessels structurally sound but leave imperfections caused by the shattering visible, bearing witness to the explosion. The exhibition will take visitors on the journey undergone by the glass vessels, from the moment of the blast to their display in the famous London museum. Lighting will be used in the display to illuminate cracks and gaps in the glass.
“We really wanted to highlight the damage these objects went through, so we can all look at the scars, and remember how they were revived together,” Camurcuoglu said.
The vessels are considered important in telling the story of the development of revolutionary glass-blowing techniques in Lebanon in the 1st century BC, enabling the mass production of glass objects and making them available for common use. Their restoration, and the teamwork involved, is a source of pride to the conservators, Camurcuoglu said.
“We all individually felt that, I think, we contributed to something by working on these objects — by sharing this pain, these emotions.
“So it’s not only about the conservation ... but also the working together and achieving something together,” she added.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby