SEXUAL FANTASIES
Myriam Boulos Loudly Disrupts
Feelings of resistance have gripped the globe especially tightly the last few years, and we aren’t just talking about political bumper stickers. As people in power tighten their figurative fists around growing numbers of people, people like Myriam Boulos defy oppression – in Boulos’ case, by documenting what she sees so that it may neither be forgotten nor denied.
Boulos carved a name for herself as a documentary photographer based in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut, currently shredded by armed conflict, violence, and civil unrest. Home, for Boulos, is a place where most people are told they should never dare to go.
That’s where Boulos begins her work; her photography marks a reckoning, a provocative dare in its own way. On one hand, she challenges the outside world to see Lebanese people as they are, in all their multifaceted complexity, protesting in the streets and nursing wounds from the haphazard medicine cabinets of their homes. On the other hand, she confronts oppressors with glimpses of proof that for many, life persists in all its lovemaking glory. It’s both a “fuck you” and a “fuck me,” and it’s unlike any photographer’s work we’ve seen here at PROVOKR.
Her work is on view at FOAM in Amsterdam in a new show, A Collective Diary: Sexual Fantasies, on view now through January 2027, and it stands in a class of its own. There’s a haunted quality to her work, and yet a manic joy, like the the way you might feel during a steamy hookup knowing that the world would very likely end tomorrow.
Absolutely everything – rules, inhibitions, hangups, anxieties, all of it – flung out the window with suicidal commitment. Then comes the sensation of dust settling on your skin after the bomb has done its damage. It’s real. It’s excruciating. And you owe it to everyone not to look away.
