Galerie Janine Rubeiz presents La toile résonnante, a curated collective exhibition featuring works by fourteen artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, installation, and mixed media. Going into its last week on display, the exhibition offers a porous surface upon which varied material vocabularies and conceptual registers resonate. In a moment marked by precarity and transformation, La toile résonnante gathers practices that respond to Lebanon’s shifting present, layering personal memory with political tension, abstraction with embodiment.
At the core of the exhibition lies a shared concern with material vulnerability and reconstitution. Dalia Baassiri’s The Harvest assembles fragments; walls, candlewax, broken branches, into mosaics of lived collapse and recovery. Similarly attentive to detritus, Ahmad Ghaddar’s pieces from Imperial Footprints traces mineral pigments from Barcelona’s streets back to African extractive economies, questioning the invisible scaffolding of empire. Christine Kettaneh’s Feelers responds to military surveillance through salt-cast snail shells and a short film; here, softness is both sensor and site of harm, resistance and exposure.
Pain, both bodily and generational, emerges in works like Manar Ali Hassan’s Sagas of Painful Bodies, which stitches together ink and textiles to speak to chronic pain, fragility, and liberation from bodily constraints. In contrast, Hanibal Srouji’s work seduces through beauty; shimmering fields marked by fire and absence. His Healing Bands carry traces of displacement and the slow, transformative violence of time.
Several artists engage directly with landscape, both external and emotional. Dinah Diwan’s From Shore to Shore traces the migratory journeys to unknown lands while meditating on what it means to start anew. François Sargologo’s lush photographic works bear the exhibition’s title and stage nature as simulacrum to ponder on the idea of representation, illusion, and reality. Petram Chalach too, explores impermanence, weaving imagined terrains where decay and rejuvenation co-exist, a quiet ode to becoming. Aida Salloum’s work on the other hand, turns inward, preoccupied with the idea of dispersion, not only as a formal gesture but as a conceptual state. With deliberate lines and restrained palettes, she captures the periphery of form, gesturing toward the essence of its fragility and depicting what is sensed, what lies just beyond visibility, in the act of becoming.
Time’s texture is central to Bassam Geitani’s La Peau du Temps, which treats the city’s surfaces as skin marked by erosion, rust, and the scars of historical repetition. Ghada Zoghbi, in contrast, steps into a suspended temporality before sin, before morality, exploring desire as a primal gesture toward the world, rather than a fall from grace.
Human and vegetal bodies intertwine in Leila Jabre Jureidini’s embroidered tribute to Baobab trees; mystical, generous beings that shelter memory and nurture life. Joseph Harb’s Les 3 Grâces renders the feminine figure in fragmented, textural triptychs, where the body becomes architecture and interiority. Alain Vassoyan’s modular Meditation Tower sculpture uses repetition and recombination to evoke collective stillness and shared presence.
Together, the exhibition hums with tension and poetics, between past and present, rupture and care, pain and pleasure. La toile résonnante becomes not a fixed canvas, but a field of encounters, textured, elusive, and insistently alive.
Location: Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut, Lebanon
Date: 25 June until 25 July 2025