Selected Exhibitions

Home Beirut. Sounding the Neighbors
curated by Hou Hanru and Giulia Ferracci

With works by artists: Ziad Abillama / Shirin Abu Shaqra / Etel Adnan / Tamara Al-Samerraei / Mounira Al Solh / Haig Aivazian / Ziad Antar / Caline Aoun / Marwa Arsanios / Tarek Atoui / Vartan Avakian / Eric Baudelaire / Tony Chakar / Ali Cherri / Roy Dib / Maroun El-Daccache / Fouad Elkoury / Sirine Fattouh / Laure Ghorayeb / Ahmad Ghossein / Mona Hatoum / Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige / Hatem Imam / Lamia Joreige / Mazen Kerbaj / Bernard Khoury / Walid Raad / Marwan Rechmaoui / Graziella Rizkallah Toufic / Stéphanie Saadé / Rania Stephan / Jalal Toufic / Paola Yacoub / Akram Zaatari / Cynthia Zaven.

Al Maslakh / Annihaya (Mazen Kerbaj, Hatem Imam, Sharif Sehnaoui, Studio Safar) / Arab Center for Architecture / Foundation for Arab Music Archiving & Research

A new chapter of the series of Interactions across the Mediterranean dedicated to the relationship between Europe and the Middle East.
The story of a city, a laboratory of resistance, artistic innovation and hope seen through over 100 works.

The exhibition intends to put forward some of the most important trends of creative explorations of the contemporary reality intensively incarnated in the city’s development and destiny. It will present some 36 artists, architects, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, researchers, activists with their diverse forms of expressions negotiating between critical reflections of recent history of conflicts, through archiving and re-enacting memories, and prospections of the future, through attempts of urban transformation and global outreaching, periodically interrupted by urgent problems and frustrations of the present. It is structured in several sections reflecting efforts to build homes in a highly complicated urban context to accommodate different intellectual claims and artistic imaginations as well as various political positions.

‘The River’ (Drawings, 2017) & ‘After the River’ (Three channel video installation, 2016)

After the River, the latest work within the project Under–Writing Beirut — Nahr, uncovers the different facets of Beirut River, from its social history to its recent and rapid transformations. Rendering a sensorial geography of the place, this work features a former landowner, Beirut Art Center’s janitor, as well as construction workers building high-rise residentials. In this three-channel video installation, Lamia Joreige explores notions of borders and landscape and reflects on the diverse migrant population that has historically settled along the river’s banks. She studies the potential for gentrification of this area, one of the few remaining unexploited spaces in the capital. The area saw the rapid development of what has long been a derelict piece of land into a place of interest for art practitioners and recently, the site of high-rise residential constructions. The ambitious plans to rehabilitate the river and the influx of refugees and migrants to the ever–expanding city make the future of the river and the fate of all the communities living in the area unknown.

The series of drawings The River are based on various maps of Beirut. They depart from the topography of the river then grow organically in abstract shapes, evoking flowers, bodily organs and cells.