Art Exhibitions Now: Beirut In Rome
Home Beirut. Sounding the Neighbors runs at MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome until 20 May 2018
This group show, curated by Hou Hanru and Giulia Ferracci, is the newest chapter of the ongoing exhibition series Interactions across the Mediterranean. The latest iteration looks to Beirut following annual focuses on Iran and Istanbul, which began in 2015.
Treating Beirut as a city that is processing its complex past while acting as a laboratory for the future, 36 artists and over 100 works tackle the city’s specific cultural diversity, memory of war, the effervescence of the present and urban transformation over the last 20 years. The exhibition, which is split into four categories of “home”: Home for Memory, Home for Everyone, Home for Remapping and Home for Joy, hones in on concerns such as ideas of belonging and how to create a sense of home in an environment of vastly disparate forms of identity. Supplemented with workshops, performances and education projects, visitors can expect to see works by Etel Adnan, Mounira Al Solh, Ziad Antar, Caline Aoun (who just won Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2018), Fouad Elkoury, Mona Hatoum, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Walid Raad, and Akram Zaatari, among several others.