An artist-led exhibition reckons with Lebanon’s trauma

For decades, Lebanon has been a byword for “resilience”, enduring repeated conflicts and crises. Yet, even in the current moment of relative calm – marked by the recent visit from Pope Leo XIV – bombs continue to fall, while the country remains trapped in political paralysis and economic collapse.

For many Lebanese, these conditions have become an immutable fact of life – an avoidant response shaped by generations of violence and injustice.

A new exhibition by AD Leb, hosted at Beit Beirut, pushes back against this culture of silence. Titled Freedom Recalled, it brings together works by 36 artists who confront the emotional and psychological scars of Lebanon’s past and present, addressing events from the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War to today.

“Since 1975, we have been in a continuous state of chaos,” AD Leb founder and director Annie Vartivarian tells The National.

“Nothing is ever resolved in this country. The same catastrophes are repeated again and again, and people want to forget. There is no justice. There is just trauma. But if we take this opportunity to remember, to resist what is happening and come together, perhaps we can begin to solve these problems.”

Vartivarian’s connection to the exhibition is deeply personal. “I lost my daughter in the Beirut Port explosion. I lost a young cousin when I was 19. I lost most of my family when they left the country,” she says. “As Lebanese, we talk about resilience and moving on – but there is resilience, and then there is amnesia. This exhibition was born not from nostalgia, but from an urgent need to confront a past that has never been allowed to conclude.”

Works at the exhibition depict different moments of Lebanon's long history of national traumas over the past several decades. Photo: Robert McKelvey

The choice of Beit Beirut as the exhibition’s venue is deliberate. Built in 1924 as an apartment building, it was later occupied by militants during the civil war and transformed i