Shifting Crossroads – Beirut Contemporary


In the art world, we often negotiate meaning and significance through parameters such as geography and time – the idea that art reflects the moment of its making as its inscribed story. As time passes, we assign new and different layers of interpretation to works of art. As societies shift, our lens changes, and we re-enact traces of the past through the understandings of the present.
What, however, happens when you step into an exhibition that speaks with an urgency so palpable, so immediate, about what is still unfolding in the very moment of our gathering?

“Facing reality as it is,” says Nicole Saikalis, one of the founders of the Saikalis Bay Foundation and our host. This sentiment translates clearly into the materiality and curation of the exhibition – but more than that, it lives in the conversation, the framing, and the language being used. After one year of planning, the exhibition Shifting Crossroads – Beirut Contemporary opens at CIRCOLO – the foundation’s non-profit contemporary art space in Milan. It marks a critical point in time for the Middle East and signals an undeniable connection to the wider world and its perception.

The Saikalis Bay Foundation is rooted in the belief that art is relational – a field in which practices connect people, places, and stories across borders. With ties extending between Beirut, Paris, London, and Milan, the foundation supports both emerging and established artists, promoting cosmopolitan practices while fostering dialogue, inspiration, and exchange.

Walking through the space, one encounters what initially feels like a soft, emotional protest – a reflection on resilience in relation to what is presented. Yet resilience, we are told, is not the word they wish to use for this exhibition, nor for the current condition of Beirut and Lebanon. Resilience gestures towards a closure, an overcoming, that simply does not exist. The country continues to endure profound political and infrastructural failures, leaving its people to repeatedly repair, rebuild, and survive. And now, once again, it finds itself under attack – history insisting on its unfinishedness. Instead, Saikalis proposes “renaissance” – rebirth – as a more fitting, if complicated, term. Resilience has become a forced condition, not a celebration of what comes after. Nothing is resolved; nothing has settled. And while “renaissance” may feel premature given the circumstances, it carries a necessary insistence on transformation, on the possibility of life otherwise.

Listening to the conversation between host, guests, and artists, I wonder about the positionality of private art institutions, often approached with suspicion and questioned for their opacity or perceived lack of accountability. While it remains crucial not to be seduced by the polished exclusivity of the art world, whether public or private, we nonetheless require an ecosystem that can hold both – one that understands the value of these spaces in relation to one another. The Saikalis Bay Foundation operates within this tension. Its impetus does not read as merely private, but deeply personal – an understanding of position, responsibility, and opportunity which makes the conversation about locality and time possible in the first place.

There is a generosity here that resides in the activation of space, in the people it gathers, and in the stories it allows to circulate. It is an ongoing expansion of connections, mirroring Shifting Crossroads, which “invites us to see the city as a living map of connections – where artists trace routes between past and present, East and West, the personal and the collective – revealing, through their gaze, a space of attentiveness and ongoing reconfiguration, a human geography of the contemporary Mediterranean,” reads the exhibition statement.

We encounter ten artistic positions that range across sculpture, installation, photography, video, and drawing. Among them is Soraya Salwan Hammoud, a young Beirut-based artist who is present and explains how the “square represents a mutual ground” and how she processes organic data into tools and resources, extending her methods into digital realms and revealing connections between human and more-than-human systems. Her works are deeply relational – even when they appear flat on paper. Installed across the wall, the varying sizes and distances between the works create a shifting typology between artist and world, viewer and object – like moving geographic markers. Progenie of Oil (2025) is made with fire, bone, pigment, and oil, acting as active agents rather than passive materials.

Earlier that same morning, I had seen the work of Mona Hatoum at Fondazione Prada where her installations unfold across large spaces – intricate, soft, aloof, and deeply poetic. At CIRCOLO, however, her work shifts scale. It becomes intimate. Monumentality is condensed into something fragile, almost held. Her piece replicates The Witness (2009), drawing directly from Lebanon’s 20th-century history: a miniature porcelain reproduction of a bronze monument located in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, which is marked by bullet holes from the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Hatoum’s reproduction remains faithful to these scars.

And then there is land – not only as a geographic construct, but as soil, as substance, as the ground upon which life insists. A landscape shaped as much by its people as by its fractures. The French artist Catherine Cattaruzza follows three major seismic fault lines crossing Lebanon, using expired analogue film to capture terrains defined by fragility and continuous shift in her work I am Folding the Land (2022). The images hover between revelation and disappearance, evoking a territory shaped by memory, crisis, and ongoing transformation.

Or Omar Mismar’s distorted and fragmented archival traces of urbanity – Untitled, Root and Branch #1 5202, شيل ما تخلّي (2025). The Beirut-based artist shows two abstract paintings using salvaged PVC flex banners as canvas. On the surface appear graffiti slogans from the 2019 protests in Lebanon that were later covered or censored in a manner that did not fully erase them – residues that have not yet been digested, anchors of a moment that carries on.

Shifting Crossroads – Beirut Contemporary becomes less an exhibition than a material translation of a condition. Architecturally speaking, it operates as an interstitial space – one in flux, actively reshaped, defining conclusion. It matters what forces act upon change. Change itself is constant – generative and destructive in equal measure. And within that, there is an exhaustion: of rebuilding, of systems that repeatedly fail, of structures that refuse to hold – “And still I rise” as Maya Angelou’s poem declares. 
And then there is what Beirut-based curator Ibrahim Nehme speaks of in his exhibition essay so poignantly: “The Mediterranean has always been a sea of crossings: of trade and empire, but also of whispers, recipes, jokes, and mourning songs carried from one port to another. The artists gathered here belong to that stubborn current. They remind us that the sea does not separate; it connects. Through story, through wound, through struggle, through art. This exhibition opens as an invitation to listen rather than to look, to recognise in these fragments something that exceeds place.”

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Shifting Crossroads – Beirut Contemporary
23 March – 3 July 2026
at Saikalis Bay Foundation, CIRCOLO, Milan

Artists Catherine Cattaruzza, Simone Fattal, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Mona Hatoum, Lamia Joreige, Omar Mismar, Rabih Mroué, Stéphanie Saadé, Soraya Salwan Hammoud, Akram Zaatari