Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary offers an overview of the current Lebanese artistic landscape. Internationally renowned figures such as Mona Hatoum and Simone Fattal dialogue with younger artists and projects emerging from the research of Nicole Saikalis and Matteo Bay, who founded in 2024 the Saikalis Bay Foundation with the aim of promoting an open and interconnected vision of the contemporary.
AA.VV., “Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary”, installation view at Circolo, Milano, ph. Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Saikalis Bay Foundation
Shifting Crossroads unfolds not only at a moment of global crisis, marked by war and the totalitarian drift of politics, but also within a phase of artistic practice and criticism that tends to reduce categories such as stratification, suspension and fragility to abstract conditions, necessary and sufficient for the validation of a poetic direction. The exhibition presents a wide range of approaches, spanning historical-archival investigation, photography, installation, painting and sculpture, offering a plural and collective vision distinguished by the biographical and iconographic intensity of the works.
AA.VV., “Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary”, installation view at Circolo, Milano, ph. Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Saikalis Bay Foundation
In Stage of Life (2021), Stéphanie Saadé establishes a unit of measurement for memory through the destruction of an object that once belonged to her. The carpet, cut into strips of equal width, becomes a measure of distance, like that separating two buildings, or her bed from her brother’s, constructing a geography, or a toponymy, of affection and trauma. What is most compelling is the deep and intense relationship between conceptual and biographical dimensions. At first glance, the minimality of Stage of Life recalls a kind of minimalist flatness, Garutti’s shaped carpeting, or Mel Bochner’s spatial measurements. Yet what distinguishes Saadé’s work, and indeed the entire exhibition, is its constant questioning of categories such as the symbolic dimension, time and space, which are not treated in aprioristic or abstract terms. Rather, these are qualities that express a condition of fragility and precariousness, shaped by the unstable balances of power that have cyclically marked the eastern Mediterranean.
AA.VV., “Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary”, installation view at Circolo, Milano, ph. Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Saikalis Bay Foundation
In Catherine Cattaruzza’s work, nature becomes a metaphor for this condition. Her photographs focus on recurring themes such as fault lines and thresholds, which reflect personal, existential, political and historical states. In I am Folding the Land (2022), the artist transforms the three main seismic faults crossing Lebanon into images of its socio-political and economic fractures, metaphors for the instability that has torn the country’s recent history. Shot using film that expired in 1992, the year the civil war ended, the images signal a continuity between past and present, as well as the urgency of an unhealed wound. Similarly, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige use photography to evoke a sense of instability and suspension. In Waiting for the Barbarians (2013), the flickering image suggests the expectation of movement, but the frame remains fixed and reality reveals itself as an infinite loop between anticipation and disillusionment.
AA.VV., “Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary”, installation view at Circolo, Milano, ph. Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Saikalis Bay Foundation
A comparable tension emerges in Mroue’s investigation into the causes and implications of conflicts afflicting the Middle East. Too close but yet inaccessible (2022) takes the form of a script in which each frame corresponds to a scene of war. The lines, at times sparse and frayed, at others sharp and luminous, outline landscapes unified by the presence of figures running in different directions. Mroue speaks of “a flight from destruction, toward a better and more peaceful life”, a trajectory that moves “from one darkness to another”, “from one hope to another” where “fear won’t do any good. Prayer won’t do any good”.
AA.VV., “Shifting Crossroads. Beirut Contemporary”, installation view at Circolo, Milano, ph. Andrea Rossetti, courtesy Saikalis Bay Foundation
So, what does ultimately remain? What persists is the legacy of a millennia-old history, from the earliest trading ports and the birth of the alphabet – as in Akram Zaatari’s YM Series (2024) – to the empires that dominated Mediterranean shores; from the stories preserved in Lebanese state archives and beyond, at the core of Lamia Joreige’s research, to the PVC banners recovered by Omar Mismar. What remains is resistance, the capacity to overcome defeat, and an urban landscape whose stratifications highlight the fragility of a space constantly negotiating memory, propaganda, and surveillance. On one side, Witness by Mona Hatoum condenses, through the model of the Martyrs’ Square monument in Beirut, the relationship between image, history, political rhetoric, and memory, recounting, through bullet perforations, the events that have shaken Lebanon throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the other, Simone Fattal’s works exist in a delicate balance between the archaeological and the contemporary, the existential and the ideal. Even when defeated, the standing figure becomes a symbol of resistance, and resistance, one hopes, generates light.
Info:
AA.VV. Shifting Crossroads | Beirut Contemporary
23/03/2026 – 3/07/2026
Artists: Catherine Cattaruzza, Simone Fattal, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Mona Hatoum, Lamia, Joreige, Omar Mismar, Rabih Mroué, Stéphanie Saadé, Soraya Salwan Hammoud e Akram Zaatari.
CIRCOLO
SAIKALIS BAY FOUNDATION
Via della Spiga 48, Milano
www.saikalisbayfoundation.org
After graduating in Economics and Management of Cultural Heritage, he earned a master’s degree in Art History. Writing is a way to engage directly with artists’ research, gaining in-depth knowledge of them, and bringing out the layers of their language. The work of art responds to an intimate, shared and complex code that requires constant exploration and dialogue.
NO COMMENT