La toile résonnante
Group Exhibition
June 25 – July 25
Galerie Janine Rubeiz is thrilled to invite you to the opening of our curated collective exhibition “La toile résonnante” on Wednesday June 25 from 5 to 8pm.
Featuring works by Manar Ali Hassan, Dalia Baassiri, Petram Chalach, Dinah Diwan, Bassam Geitani, Ahmad Ghaddar (Renoz), Joseph Harb, Leila Jabre Jureidini, Christine Kettaneh, Aida Salloum, François Sargologo, Hanibal Srouji, Alain Vassoyan, and Ghada Zoghbi, the exhibition aims to create a dialogue between different backgrounds and varying practices, reflecting our current, often challenging, realities in Lebanon.
The exhibition will be on view until July 25, 2025, Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 6pm, and on Saturdays, 11am to 4pm.
Beirut Art Days | Special Performance | July 10
In collaboration with Zeina Saleh Kayali, founder and director of the Figures Musicales du Liban collection, Galerie Janine Rubeiz is thrilled to also invite you to a series of flute performances by Antonio Al Mallah, on Thursday July 10th, from 3 to 8pm.
This performance is part of Beirut Art Days, a series of events organized by L’Agenda.
Manar Ali Hassan - SAGAS OF PAINFUL BODIES (2024)
This series explores the profound and often unseen realities of living with chronic pain, unveiling how persistent physical suffering shapes identity and experience. It confronts the body’s vulnerability and the ways pain confines and disrupts existence, evoking a sense of entrapment within invisible forces. At the same time, it challenges the traditional understanding of the body as a fixed and protective container, creating space to consider impermanence and the possibility of liberation beyond physical limits. Through this exploration, the work invites reflection on the complex relationship between pain, selfhood, and resilience.
Dalia Baassiri - The Harvest - الحصاد
For the past 3 years, Dalia collected different forms of “vulnerability.” Mainly elements: wall fragments from the Fayyad Building facing the port of Beirut, burnt candles left post-prayers in Harissa, and broken tree branches strewn across the streets of Beirut, cut intentionally to make charcoal for Chichas Smokers.
Through the process of assemblage, these fragments fused into compositions that reveal their intrinsic properties, occasionally emulating and blending with other elements like chameleons.
At times, they become one entity, an iconic presence on raw canvas — a mosaic structure of past narratives woven into the fabric of the present. Just as in the horticultural grafting technique — where tissues from one plant are joined with those of another so that they grow together and function as a single plant — the wall pieces meld into the tree itself.
Her harvesting journey has been long: from dust to ash, to soap suds, to discarded objects... She has always been obsessively in search for fragile entities, with significant stories to tell, which she identifies as the raw materials of her work.
Once found, she gave them a new solid life by embracing their delicacy and strengthening them with adhesives. This obsession lead her to ask questions like: Is vulnerability contagious? Do we end up becoming where we live? Does a daily life in an unstable environment like Lebanon make us exceptionally familiar and inherently attracted to shreds and ruptures? Is she perpetually constructing a self-portrait through these clusters of broken pieces, or is this desire to preserve and merge a form of adaptation?
Petram Chalach
This work depicts the cyclical rhythm of decay and rejuvenation, exploring the beauty found in impermanence and the quiet passage of time. Drawing from the natural processes of erosion and regeneration, the painting is a meditation on transformation—on how things dissolve, shift, and re-emerge in new forms.
Conceived in celebration of hope through constant renewal, the piece reflects on the enduring rhythm of the seasons. It invites the viewer to sit with the ephemeral: to recognize that even in apparent ruin, there is a whisper of becoming—of return, of re-formation. Through the interplay of organic forms and imagined landscapes, the work becomes a quiet homage to the cycles that govern both nature and all life.
Petram Chalach’s multidisciplinary practice, spanning over painting, ceramics, photography, and digital art, is grounded in an ongoing investigation of perception.
Drawing from nature, he explores the tension between the visible and the felt, the real and the imagined. His work engages with the absurd and the sublime as tools for challenging fixed ways of seeing. Through poetic and metaphorical imagery, I depict ideas, events, and visual memory, opening up space for reflection.
Chalach’s process is an ongoing experimentation with inter-object in inter-space, a means of logging and capturing the light seeping through the foliage. These works are records of attention: quiet meditations on image, perception, and the shifting conditions of contemporary.
Dinah Diwan
Dinah is deeply marked by departures — by the places we leave behind and those where we arrive without knowing the land. She explores expanses, landscapes, paths, vegetation, and plants. “From Shore to Shore” evokes the journey of those who cross the seas to take root in a new land.
Bassam Geitani -“La Peau du Temps ”
These paintings are fragments of urban memory, veritable biopsies of the city's skin, embodying the perpetual cycle of construction, erosion and renewal. Each piece bears the imprints of time: worn and rusted materials that tell the stories of past generations, like the deep scars and life marks of this living organism. Scratched surfaces reflect a hectic life, and even the cracks that run through the remains of what was once great are so many wrinkles and patinas accumulated on its epidermis. These are the “granites of twilight”, silent witnesses to the disappearance of one form and the birth of another, revealing the complex, layered texture of its history.
”بشرة الزمن ”
هذه اللوحات هي شظايا من ذاكرة المدينة، إنها بمثابة خزعات حقيقية من جلد المدينة، تجسد الدورة الأبدية للبناء والتآكل والتجدد. تحمل كل قطعة بصمات الزمن: من المواد البالية والصدئة التي تروي قصص الأجيال الماضية، تما ًما كالندوب العميقة وعلامات الحياة لهذا الكائن الحي. تعكس الأسطح المخدوشة حياة صاخبة، وحتى التشققات التي تخترق بقايا ما كان ، شهود صامتون على زوال شكل وولادة ”غرانيت الغروب” عظيماًهي بمثابة تجاعيد وتأكسدات متراكمة على بشرتها. إنها آخر، كاشفين عن النسيج المعقد والمتعدد الطبقات لتاريخها
Ahmad Ghaddar (Renoz) - “Artwork Statement – “Untitled” (from the project “Imperial Footprints”)
This work was created using pigment sourced from different materials collected from Barcelona. The main pigment is manganese dioxide, a material commonly used in dry-cell batteries, which I collected from the street. Manganese dioxide is a material commonly extracted from various countries in the African continent. The photo reference used is one that I found online from a company specialized in extracting minerals based in Lusaka, Zambia.
“Imperial footprints”, as a project, traces back material footprints to their original sources. The visual representation is only a reflection on the different parts of the imperial cycle, war-expansion of empire, colonization- extractive practices and militarization.
The work is part of a broader inquiry into how physical remnants of an empire, embedded in European cities, act as silent witnesses to histories of extraction, violence, and displacement. This work, like others in “Imperial Footprints”, investigates the memory of these materials and finds a visual representation for this memory.
Joseph Harb - Les 3 Graces, 2025
This triptych explores the feminine presence through a tension between fragility and strength. Three nude figures stand in fragmented spaces, composed of geometric patterns, architectural elements and rough textures.
Each woman seems frozen in a suspended moment - between confrontation, solitude and silent resistance.
The work evokes the memory of the body, the layers of intimacy and the traces left by personal and collective history. The eye wanders through interior landscapes where bodies become architecture, and walls become witnesses.
Leila Jabre Jureidini
Given their peculiar shape, an Arabian legend has it that “the devil plucked up the Baobab tree, thrust its branches into the earth, and left its roots in the air.” It was love at first sight. I had only ever encountered their name in a childhood book that left a profound impression on me—Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. A story that sparked countless childhood dreams and carried my imagination to uncharted destinations.
Who could have known that, years later, I would be utterly captivated by the Baobabs I discovered in Zanzibar? The moment I saw them, I recognized them instinctively, despite having no prior knowledge of the local flora. I found myself on a quest, scanning the landscape for every one of these majestic trees I could glimpse in the distance. Enchanted, I felt compelled to uncover what made Baobabs so extraordinary. Was it their immense size, their astonishing shapes, or the sense of mystery they evoked? Perhaps it was a bit of everything... Stitching, weaving, and painting with color are my ways of honoring the magical beauty of these majestic trees.
Baobabs are a vital source of shelter and sustenance, providing nutritious fruit for countless animals, reptiles, insects, and bats. They store water in their trunks, sustaining elephants during dry seasons, and their edible leaves play a key role in various herbal remedies. Each piece I created in this series captures a fragment of this story, hoping to honor and preserve the legacy of these ancient trees—some of which, like the recently collapsed Namibian “Grootboom,” have lived for over 1,275 years, according to Africa Geographic.
Christine Kettaneh - Feelers: On Softness, Signal and the Politics of Exposure An installation by Christine Kettaneh
“Feelers” is an art installation comprising a short experimental film and a salt-based sculptural work, created during an artist residency in Niscemi, Sicily (2018). Within a protected oak forest, the artist encountered the MUOS military satellite system—vast antennas built by the United States to transmit tactical data across the globe. Their presence is monumental yet invisible: metallic bodies that pierce the sky while silently infiltrating the ground, air, and bodies below.
The film, titled “Feelers,” draws a metaphor between the MUOS antennas and the sensory tentacles of snails—soft, exposed feelers that navigate through touch. These “world feelers” become a way to explore vulnerability under threat. As the military antennas scan and transmit, they symbolically discover the very thing that destroys the snail: salt. A simple substance becomes a metaphor for targeted destruction—showing how technologies of war work by identifying and exploiting points of sensitivity—geographical, biological, emotional.
“Feelers” reflects on how militarized technologies repurpose perception into power: how to feel becomes to be exposed, and to be mapped is to be made vulnerable. The snail becomes a stand-in for the human—sensing, soft- bodied, and increasingly entangled in invisible systems of surveillance and control.
This metaphor carries into the sculptural work: a series of snail shells cast in salt. Crystalline and luminous, salt becomes both beautiful and dangerous—preserving and erasing at once. These shells stand as fragile monuments, elegies for soft systems turned against themselves.
At its core, the work asks: What happens when the architecture of war touches the skin? When softness is weaponized? In the contrast between metal and membrane, signal and salt, “Feelers” gestures toward a poetics of resistance—where fragility becomes not just a site of harm, but of witnessing.
FEELERS was screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO) and later won the Best Experimental Short Film prize at the Mediterranean Film Festival, Cannes (2018) and the Art Rights Prize ‘Partner Prize Award’ promoted by Isorropia Home gallery, Milan (2021); it was also an official selection at the Berlin Revolution Film Festival (2020), Under_the Radar film festival, Vienna (2019), and the Madrid International Film Festival (2019).
Aida Salloum
.تبتعد لكن تقترب . تغيب لكن تتجلي . تنكشف لكن تخطب . شجرة لكن عصفور.واحدة لكن متعددة . كلٌ لكن مجموع . ورقة لكن لون.خط لكن هو.جدا لكن تتهاوى
Far away but close. Unseen but revealed. Revealing but hiding. A tree but a bird. One but many. Whole but total. Leaf but color. A line but air. A hand but a falling star...
François Sargologo
Sargologo’s photographic scenes, characterized by the omnipresence of exuberant nature, bear the same name as the exhibition. These panoramas, akin to a state of “waking dreaming”, reflect a body of work inspired by the realm of oneirism and romantic parody. However, Romanticism is neither Realism nor Naturalism; it undoubtedly acts to distance itself from reason and objectivity, at the risk of falling into the Platonic simulacrum, a mere imitation of what it claims to represent.1 In The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze had already proposed rehabilitating the simulacrum by attributing to it an intrinsic value independent of what it falsely represents. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudril- lard takes the idea even further; for him, the simulacrum is no longer about parody or falsification but about “substituting the signs of the real with the real itself.”2
Sargologo’s photographic scenes are no longer intended to paint an accurate portrait of nature, which becomes no more than a pretext for something else. Sargologo thus goes beyond Romanticism, surpassing it and pushing it to the limit, to the point of becoming a caricature of himself.
This body of work evokes nature at its apotheosis, heralding something yet to come. It calls upon the sublime in the sense that Edmund Burke described in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, a delightful horror, i.e., a feeling that transcends beauty, invoking both awe and terror, summoning up dread and trap- ping the viewer between wonder and anguish.3
1 The simulacrum in Plato’s view is thus a deceptive appearance based on an optical illusion. The Stranger introduces this distinction to define the sophist as an illusionist—that is, a producer of simulacra, a fabricator of fictions.
2 According to Baudrillard, when it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is about substituting the signs of the real for the real itself” (“The Precession of Simulacra,” 2).
3 According to Burke, the Beautiful is what is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, while the Sublime is what has the power to overwhelm and destroy us.
Hanibal Srouji
With Srouji the piece he is presenting seem to send out contradictory signals. We’re greeted by medium-format work whose shimmering colors and movement could be a reference to romantic seascapes. Far from realism, we are invited to plunge into a visual imaginary of musical composition and contemplate pieces of land, sea and sky, where spaces are intertwined, temporal dimensions altered and the human figure excluded.
He seduces us - or tries to seduce us - with his “beautiful manners”, Srouji here inscribes his practice with an economy of means, as if to show what is not, or what is no longer. One fact is worth mentioning: the artist here integrates the element of fire as an integral tool in his creation. Healing Bands - free floating canvases, burnt and nailed to the wall.
Fire is already a marking technique; here, it’s a subject that goes back to the journey of the artist, his generation and possibly those that followed, who saw and experienced successive Naqbas hit the country and the region.1 In other words, being born in this part of the world is synonymous with an obligation to live in uncertainty and chaos, with departure as the only hope of salvation, another romantic idea, where elsewhere would always be better. Twenty years earlier, Samir Kassir wrote that “it’s not good to be an Arab these days. (...) Whichever way you look at it, the picture is bleak, and even bleaker when compared with other parts of the world.”2
Since the late 80s of the previous century, Srouji has been attempting to address this troubling question of identity and belonging. Subsequently, he has always flirted with the idea of beauty, expression and emotion, to sublimate real violence. His paintings refer to melodious, dissonant internal structures, as well as to questioning notions of space, composed and recomposed in a temporal and timeless flux.
1 The term Naqba or Nakba usually refers to the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their land in 1948. Used in the plural, it returns to its original meaning - catastrophe - to cover all the disasters that have taken place since.
2 Samir Kassir, Considérations sur le malheur arabe, Arles, Actes Sud / Sindbad, 2004, p. 9.
Alain Vassoyan - Meditation Tower (painted resin and wood)
This sculpture is part of the Body Stealers series. However, it is larger than the average height, which is around 36 to 38 cm.
The sculptures from to this series have the particularity of being able to infinitely exchange their respective parts to continually form new figures. This artwork, Meditation Tower, uses a variation on the same head 3 times to evoke a situation of collective serenity.
Ghada Zoghbi
In this work, Zoghbi seeks to explore the dichotomy between desire and sin, suggesting that before humanity grappled with morality, there existed an innate longing for experience and discovery.
Before the narratives of right and wrong, there was simply the desire to reach for something pure, to embrace pure existence.
It captures a moment suspended in time—before the weight of sin, before the fall.