Rayyane Tabet was born in Ashqout, Lebanon in 1983. He adopts an archaeological perspective, digging to find material traces capable of depicting narratives of the past through objects. His works, which are primarily sculptural, often tackle issues in the modern history of the Republic of Lebanon, drawing on personal experience and memory.
Steel Rings (2013 – ongoing) and Letterheads (1950-2013), installation and collection of documents
Both works are part of the series The Shortest Distance Between Two Points.
The Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPline) was a bold American business venture: an oil pipeline 1,213 km long that transported oil from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon through Jordan, Syria, and the Golan Heights from 1950 to 1983. The socio-political developments that later affected those areas brought about the dissolution of the company and the pipeline was abandoned. Today, this infrastructure is the only existing thing that physically manages to cross the border of five different political entities in a territory where borders are of great importance. Steel Rings is a sculpture that replicates the pipeline through 10-cm segments with the same diameter and thickness of the original pipes, each with an incision indicating its distance from the source and actual geographical coordinates. Letterheads, on the other hand, is a series of framed paper documents found in the abandoned offices of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline headquarters in Beirut. A silent series of sheets laid one beside the other form a timeline describing the rise and fall of this infrastructure.