Biography
Loulou Bissat is a French Lebanese interior architect and artist. Loulou was born in 1971 in Beirut, where she spent her childhood, and moved to France in 1984, due to the war.
Whilst studying for her Interior Architecture Diploma in Nice, Loulou developed her technical painting skills attending her art teacher's studio in Vieille Antibes, where many artists found inspiration. She continued experimenting over the years, with various techniques, under different artists.
Being away from her hometown for many years set her on a quest of uncovering stories of places and times she never experienced. The journey back started in 2019.
With a multifaceted career in Interior Architecture, Loulou found her inspiration in Lebanon’s architecture; buildings renowned for their architectural charm, their historical significance, the ones designed by famous architects, and notably local landmarks that have stood as silent witnesses to the past. Whilst it was the buildings that revealed the stories of cities, the local culture was reflected in the dialect, the music, and the garments.
Frame Story
Loulou's first solo exhibition in London, Frame Story, is a collection of stories based on months spent mapping Beirut’s neighbourhoods, walking its streets, tasting its food, and just watching the locals, their stories unfolding. This project pays homage to existing and erased places across several neighbourhoods, and aims to highlight the threat to the existence of historic buildings. Not all these places, however, are in tourists guides or on postcards, some were serendipitous encounters: a grocery store, a flower shop, a bookshop; ordinary places with extraordinary people. Some might know the characters of these stories and what happened on their last page; I wished I could rewrite some endings, but I could only retell their stories.
“Looking at old photos its hard not to feel a kind of wanderlust, a pang of nostalgia for times you’ve never experienced. Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by.”
John Koeing
Voyage of a Migrating Blue Bird
To commemorate its 30th anniversary, Galerie Janine Rubeiz initiated Encounters 2023, a theme based competition, curated by Manar Ali Hassan, that draws inspiration from pioneering Lebanese artists, fostering cross-historical dialogue between the past and present.
Voyage of a Migrating Blue Bird was inspired by Etel Adnan's leporello, her distinct use of colour, and her love for poetry.
Inspired to celebrate my hometown and the lyricism it inspired, Voyage of a Migrating Blue Bird documents my encounters with poets, musicians, writers and travellers, as I travelled the Mediterranean Sea searching for my homeland. It is the threading of various narratives, open pages of numerous books, a dialogue in poetry, with recurring words.
"I learned all the words and broke them up to make a single word: Homeland"
Mahmoud Darwish
Magic Carpet From Caravanserai
Stories from The Present Past exhibition, curated by Inspired to Curate, in collaboration with Sharqy Foundation and Institut Francais du Liban, featured multidisciplinary artists from Saida.
Magic Carpet from Caravanserai was inspired by the art of story-telling that has entertained generations over the years. Derived from the word hekaya, meaning tale, the hakawati tradition of storytelling is revived in Saida during Ramadan, where people gather and tell stories. Taking inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights, where many of the stories contrast closed spaces, such as palaces, with journeys through open spaces, I will be telling my stories from within the Hammam al Jadeed, a place where traditionally stories were shared, taking the viewer on a journey on my magic carpet (Bissat) around Saida, onto pages of an unfolding book.
"There are places that inspire lyricism.
The long and narrow plain that runs along the Mediterranean littoral has captured the imagination of travellers since ancient times"
Samir Kassir