One year after the August 4, 2020 explosion that devastated the port of Beirut, the Arab World Institute pays tribute to the vitality and resilience of the Lebanese art scene. With the exhibition Lumières du Liban. Art moderne et contemporain de 1950 à aujourd’hui (September 21-January 2, 2022), the IMA celebrates the prodigious creativity of modern and contemporary artists from Lebanon and its diasporas, from the day after its independence in 1943 to the present day, with works by Shafic Abboud, Etel Adnan, Saliba Douaihy, Paul Guiragossian, Hussein Madi, Assadour, Chaouki Choukini, Ayman Baalbaki, Zad Moultaka, Serwan Baran, Hala Matta, Hiba Kalache, Zena Assi and Tagreed Darghouth.

More than a hundred works by 55 artists are revealed for this occasion, they were selected from the collection of modern and contemporary Arab art of the IMA, the largest in Europe (with its collection of nearly 600 Lebanese works) since its merger with the major donation of Claude and France Lemand in 2018, constantly enriched donation since then. “With Lights of Lebanon, the Arab World Institute expresses its full solidarity with the Lebanese people, and its world of arts and culture,” said Jack Lang, president of the IMA. Claude Lemand adds: “This exhibition bears witness to the luminous face of another Lebanon, that of its artists and its creators. It shows how big this small country is, and how, despite its misfortunes, victims and crisis, it remains the human and cultural melting pot that it has always been ”.

Lumières du Liban recalls the unique place of the Lebanese visual arts scene since the country’s independence, and reflects the complexity and artistic, human, geographical, historical and cultural richness of Lebanon. Scarred by conflicts and crises ranging from the civil war (1975-1990) to the explosion of the port of Beirut in August 2020, this history, sometimes chaotic, should not obscure its role as a major cultural melting pot, always well alive today: A role played by this country since Antiquity, as evidenced by the exhibition Liban, l’autre rive presented at the IMA in 1998-1999. The exhibition retraces in filigree seven decades of art history punctuated by the effervescence after the independence of Lebanon in 1943 and after the Second World War, the tears of civil war and exile, the artistic bubbling of globalisation.

More info on the following link.
https://www.imarabe.org/en/expositions/lumieres-du-liban

Courtesy of Institut du monde arabe

Artwork caption: Abdul Rahman Katanani, Autoportrait et Ombre, 2020. Plaques de metal et de bois, 180 x 200 x 60 cm.