Bitter Flight captures and distorts light from Burj El Murr, an unfinished Beirut building whose construction halted with the Civil War in 1975. Once among the tallest, it became a sniper post and detention center. Today, abandoned and too costly to demolish, it remains a perch for birds and a remnant of conflict.
The work centers a structure whose human purpose was never fulfilled, yet persists as an urban carcass — a marker of collective memory and a glimpse of a post-human landscape, where architecture is inhabited by other-than-human life.
The images are silver gelatin prints made in the artist’s apartment-turned-camera obscura. Drawing in the building’s light, she inverts and fragments its rigid form in a performative act, rendering it mutable — open to quiet, soft, uncanny renewal.
about the artist
Tamara Kalo’s practice explores the intersection of land, body, home, and collective memory through distortion, glitching, and fragmentation in photography, performance video, sculpture and textile.
