Hala Ezzeddine engages in a kind of ethnographic painting. For the better part of the decade, her object of study has been the landscape of Arsal – her hometown near Lebanon’s border with Syria – and the children with which it is populated. Having worked there as a public-school teacher of the fine arts during the Syrian Civil War, she produced portraits of the Syrian refugees who had traversed the border into Lebanon and landed in her classes. In the past year, the scope of her painting practice broadened in response to the popular uprisings against the ruinous economic conditions in Lebanon. Her practice has since shifted from the localised context of Arsal to include portraits and landscapes of Beirut, evoking a generalised state of destitution.

Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery