Beirut’s art scene has taken a more serious tone this summer – and quite understandably so. These six exhibitions invite visitors to reflect on Lebanon’s future, but also offer avenues for escape.

Visions of Today, Galerie Janine Rubeiz

The wonderful Galerie Janine Rubeiz presents an important and topical summer exhibition exploring the future of Lebanon. The gallery has invited a number of artists, most of whom they have been working with since the beginning of the Lebanese Revolution, to share their vision on how they see Lebanon moving forward. The exhibited artists reflect, through their current work, how the country could and should respond to its increasingly challenging realities, and how to transcend, confront, or escape the conditions the Lebanese people and residents of the country are subject to. Except lots of engaging pieces and challenging ideas by the kinds of Manar Ali Hassan Galvani, Ara Azad, Rached Bohsali, Carole Chaker, Karma Dabaghi, Mirna Maalouf, and Nada Matta.

The first display of works has just opened, followed by a second display starting 29 July. The exhibition closes on 20 August.

Chimera: Remembrance of a Blooming Mind. Souraya Haddad Credoz, The Upper Gallery at Saleh Barakat

Saleh Barakat Gallery offers us an avenue for escape, even if for an ephemeral moment, featuring a beautiful exhibition of the work of Souraya Haddad Credoz. The artist’s ceramic sculptures invite the audience for an exploration of the unfamiliar, possibly dreamy, secret and surreal. The exhibition is a celebration of Haddad Credoz’s universe, and the exhibited works are to be read as creatures born of a dormant world within us, an environment both familiar and not yet quite formed. The artist’s sculptures are not quite spherical, but clearly anatomical with reconstructive, therapeutic gestures, presenting something that no longer is, but has not yet become something else either. Between the possibility of symbiotic futures and struggles of the past, the visitors are encouraged to reflect on recent events, despite the gentle reminder of a desire to reinvent the world.

The exhibition closes on 31 July.

Water, Marfa’

Marfa’s collective summer exhibition is centred around the theme of water – a universal and unifying yet a highly political subject. The show presents the first chapter of a collaborative exhibition and online platform Galleries Curate: RHE reuniting 21 galleries across the globe. Displaying a wide range of media including film, photography, painting, sculpture, and multi-sensory installation, the exhibition explores how we are all connected, both physically and metaphorically, through water.

The exhibition closes on 13 August.

Marwan Rechmaoui: But the trees kept voting for the axe, Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Marwan Rechamoui presents a solo exhibition at Sfeir-Semler Gallery this summer, exploring Beirut. The artist who predominantly works with concrete, metal, wax and found materials such as textile and rubber, has been investigating the socio-geographies of cities throughout his career. In the wake of last August’s explosion, Rechamoui started working in the rubbles of the gallery’s space, determined to preserve vanishing moments by embedding them into solid material. This body of works reflect on the country’s reality: a decaying political system, and the thousands of disoriented, desperate Lebanese that fill the streets of the city. The theme of water is also present in this exhibition, as Rechamoui’s Beirut by the Sea maps the city’s coastline, looking at Beirut’s shores on the Mediterranean Sea.

The exhibition closes on 12 August.

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan: Flattened to a Papery Thinness, Beirut Art Centre

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan’s solo show in BAC’s Gallery 1 is something of a botched crime scene, a literal paper trail. The installation presents a proposition, asking vital questions about the legibility of space, with fragments of Abu Hamdan’s research about history as a digestive system scattered across the space in the form of visual games. Through relentless iterations including discrete drawings, large historical friezes, disorienting spatial experiments, and cryptic dioramas, the artist broadens his eclectic library of found, manipulated comic references, decontextualised educational illustrations as well as his own drawings and scribbles.

The exhibition closes on 10 September.

The Camelia Committee, Beirut Art Centre

BAC’s second summer show presents the work of Mira Adoumier, Carine Doumit and Nour Ouayda. Visitors are shown a seemingly secret garden on the outskirts of an enchanted forest, underlined by the polyphonic voices of Camelia – but who is she? Shapeshifting between myth, flower and spirit, Camelia has taken the three artists on a journey, which they now share with us, attempting to grasp fragments of her various manifestations here and there.

The exhibition closes on 10 September.

Featured image: Marwan Rechmaoui, Beirut By The Sea, 2017-2018, exhibition view, courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut, 2021.