Lina Saneh's 'Appendice' Turns the Body into a Battlefield

Lebanese artist Lina Saneh's performance 'Appendice' premiered in April 2007 at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Karantina, an industrial suburb of Beirut with a violent history during the civil war (1975-1990). In the piece, Saneh sits immobile while her partner Rabih Mroué reads a text from a lectern, speaking on her behalf. The work uses dark humor to explore themes of death, religion, and political instrumentalization in Lebanon. Saneh, who wishes to be cremated but is forbidden by religious law, proposes a macabre solution: having her organs amputated one by one to be incinerated, thereby escaping religious burial. She lists organ weights and imagines selling body parts as art online. The performance references philosophical texts by Antonin Artaud, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus, and draws on the history of Karantina—site of a 1976 massacre and now home to the B018 nightclub designed by Bernard Khoury, which resembles a mass grave. Saneh's body becomes a 'moral and aesthetic battlefield' reflecting Lebanon's identity crisis. The work extends onto blogs (kinkylina.blogspot.com, linasaneh-body-p-arts.com) where she calls on the international art community to transform her virtual body parts into artworks. 'Appendice' was also performed at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale in Paris from October 22–28, 2007. Saneh, born in Beirut in 1966, teaches at Saint-Joseph University and Holy Spirit University of Kaslik.