Journal · Guide
10 Contemporary Lebanese Artists Exploring Identity and Home
Lebanese art is a body of work made under interruption — wars, exoduses, returns, currency collapses, an explosion that measured itself in kilotons. What holds it together is not a style but a question, one the Still Home series asks in its own dialect: why is it so hard to leave, and why is it just as hard to stay?
The ten artists below — some living, some recently gone; some in Beirut, most anywhere but — offer ten different answers. Read them as neighbors to the thirteen prints in the series, not as a canon. There are many more who belong on this list.
01
Mona Hatoum
b. 1952, Beirut · Based in London
Installation, sculpture, video, performance
Hatoum was in London for a short visit in 1975 when the war made return impossible. Exile is not a subject in her work so much as its ground: household objects reshaped into cages, maps of a country in constant redraw, a body registered from the inside out.
Selected works: Measures of Distance (1988); Light Sentence (1992); Present Tense (1996).
02
Walid Raad
b. 1967, Chbanieh · Based in New York / Beirut
Photography, video, performance, archives
Through The Atlas Group, Raad built a fictional archive of the Lebanese wars — invented informants, forged photographs, plausible dossiers — to ask what a country remembers when its documents are unreliable and its witnesses are exhausted.
Selected works: The Atlas Group (1989–2004); Scratching on Things I Could Disavow (2007–ongoing).
03
Etel Adnan
1925–2021, Beirut / Paris / Sausalito · Based in Paris (until her death)
Painting, poetry, tapestry, leporello
Adnan wrote in French, painted in a language of her own — small squares of pure color arranged like sentences. Mount Tamalpais became her subject in California; Beirut remained her interior weather. Sitt Marie Rose (1977) is still one of the sharpest novels ever written about the Lebanese war.
Selected works: Untitled (Mount Tamalpais series, 1980s–2010s); Sitt Marie Rose (1977).
04
Ayman Baalbaki
b. 1975, Odaisseh · Based in Beirut
Painting
Baalbaki paints buildings pockmarked by shrapnel and figures whose faces are wrapped in keffiyehs, in an oil-thick, almost decorative palette. The prettiness is the point: the country keeps being beautiful as it comes apart.
Selected works: Destination X (2010); Al-Mulatham series (2000s–ongoing); Babel (2011).
05
Huguette Caland
1931–2019, Beirut / Paris / Venice, CA · Based in Beirut (until her death)
Painting, drawing, textile, kaftans
Daughter of Lebanon's first post-independence president, Caland left Beirut for Paris in 1970 to paint bodies as landscapes — pale, sensual, unmistakably her own. She returned to Lebanon in her final years and kept working until she couldn't lift a brush.
Selected works: Bribes de corps series (1973–ongoing); Nour (1989–1993); Tayara (Kite) series.
06
Akram Zaatari
b. 1966, Saida · Based in Beirut
Video, photography, installation, archive
Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, Zaatari treats the photograph as a document that outlives the country that produced it. His work with the studio archive of Hashem el Madani turned a single Saida photographer's practice into a portrait of a whole society.
Selected works: Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013); Twenty Eight Nights and a Poem (2015); Objects of Study / Studio Shehrazade.
07
Lamia Joreige
b. 1972, Beirut · Based in Beirut
Video, installation, drawing
Joreige works with what memory does when the archive fails — missing persons, disappeared neighborhoods, the Beirut river as a slow, polluted witness. Co-founder of Beirut Art Center, her practice is inseparable from the city's fragile institutional life.
Selected works: Objects of War (1999–ongoing); Under-Writing Beirut — Mathaf (2013); Uncertain Times (2020).
08
Rabih Mroué
b. 1967, Beirut · Based in Berlin / Beirut
Performance, video, drawing, lecture-performance
Mroué's lecture-performances stand at the seam where document meets fiction — a YouTube clip, a sniper's viewfinder, a news bulletin — and ask which image is doing which kind of violence. Leaving Beirut wasn't a break for him; it made the city legible in a new way.
Selected works: Riding on a Cloud (2013); The Pixelated Revolution (2012); Who's Afraid of Representation (2005).
09
Ali Cherri
b. 1976, Beirut · Based in Paris / Beirut
Film, sculpture, drawing, installation
Cherri works with archaeology as a way to think about violence — objects buried, reburied, misattributed, faked. His Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale for Of Men and Gods and Mud crystallized a practice that treats the earth itself as an unreliable narrator.
Selected works: The Digger (2015); Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022); Envisagement (2014).
10
Zena Assi
b. 1974, Beirut · Based in London
Painting, sculpture, mixed media
Assi paints Beirut as a stacked, tangled organism — balconies, laundry, cables, satellite dishes — and portraits whose faces are almost erased by the city they carry. She left Lebanon in 2013; the paintings have kept coming back.
Selected works: My City series (2010s); Portraits of a City (2010s–ongoing).
Further reading
Still Home is a one-time contemporary art project by Elias Maroun. The debut series, Still Beautiful. Still Broken., borrows the graphic language of cigarette-pack warnings and turns it toward another kind of dependency: the one that binds the Lebanese to their country. See the thirteen prints →