Omar Mismar is a 2022–2024 Boris Lurie Fellow whose fellowship project, Revolution is a Frown Gone Mad, is part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Correction*.

Revolution is a Frown Gone Mad investigates the rampant culture of Botox in Lebanon as an extension of war and perpetual bouts of violence. Raising fundamental questions on the aesthetics of disaster, the project takes the correction of one’s body, in the form of Botox facial injections, as an entry point to speculate on this phenomenon in Lebanon as a concerted post-war effort and reframes it as a discourse of the sensuous body and the anesthetization of the body politic. The project considers such correction as a state-administered form of redaction whereby shocks must be constantly absorbed, expressions controlled, and reactions kept at bay.

Omar Mismar is a visual artist based in Beirut. His practice is project driven, probing the entanglement of art and politics, and the aesthetics of disaster. Mismar takes up conflict and its representations via form deliberations, material interventions, and translation strategies, using the performative as gesture and rehearsal. He has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Whitney Independent Study Program, SOMA, and Art Omi. He participated in exhibitions at the San José Museum of Art, Tabakalera, MoMA, Home Works 8, VideoBrasil, Oakland Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum, Hamburg Phototriennale, and Beirut Art Center among others. In 2019, he won the VideoBrasil jury award for the MMCA Changdong Residency. Mismar has taught at California College of the Arts, The University of San Francisco, Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts, and The American University of Beirut, and is the art editor of Beirut’s literary and art journal Rusted Radishes.

The Boris Lurie Fellowship is the first artist-named fellowship at the Vera List Center. Established with a grant from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, it is named after Boris Lurie (1924–2008), Holocaust survivor and founder of the NO!art movement. In tribute to Lurie’s life and The New School’s historic role as university-in-exile during World War Two, it is awarded to an artist living outside the U.S., with special consideration given to those who have faced political hardship. For more information about this artist and the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, please visit its website.