Three artists, Taysir Batniji, Tanya Traboulsi and Tamara Kalo, invite us to contemplate the complex reality of their corner of the Arab world from an intimate, unembellished perspective. These are places marked by reconstruction, loss and resilience. 

Although their trajectories differ, they share an undercurrent which runs through their works and instills them with a poetic force that transcends the personal. 

Far from a strictly documentary approach, this exhibition proposes an immersion into deeper layers of meaning which rarely reach the headlines. Using the image as an expressive tool capable of transforming and healing, the artists reconstruct fragmented narratives about places damaged by violence and uprooting, reinterpreting experiences there on the basis of the symbolic and the aesthetic. 

Tamara Kalo, deeply connected to the living memory of the territory, pays tribute to the olive tree, an age-old emblem of permanence and intergenerational harmony. In her work, she also draws attention towards one of Beirut’s most emblematic skyscrapers, a former prison that provides a home to many birds today. Although nature has reclaimed it, the building is still standing: its demolition is unfeasible as a result of the huge expense required to take it down, thus leaving a painful scar behind on the city’s urban landscape. 

Tanya Traboulsi, on the other hand, offers us an intimate, humanistic view of Beirut before the recent conflict broke out. Through her personal memories and reunion with the city after a long stay in Europe, Traboulsi portrays a peaceful Beirut, filled with both stillness and resistance. Her delicate, honest approach guides us through a city charged with nostalgia, while also marked by the emotional resilience of its inhabitants. 

As part of the exhibition opening event, the two artists will be speaking with the curator, Ana Belén García Mula. The event will be introduced by Karim Hauser, coordinator of Casa Árabe’s Cultural Programs. You can watch the conference live on our YouTube channel. 

Tanya Traboulsi is a photographer who lives in Beirut. Her work explores deeply personal topics such as belonging, identity and memory, using images as a narrative tool. In her practice, she often combines photography with materials from her family archives, both of which focus on Beirut as a significant recurring theme. She was one of the winners of the V&A Parasol Foundation Award for Women in Photography in 2025. Her work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions around the world. Her most recent work, Beirut, Recurring Dream has been displayed in Belgium, France, Dubai and Morocco. Her collaborative project Le Rocher was shown at Marseille’s Mucem. In recent years, she has also had exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Beirut Art Center, Bildraum 01 and many other venues. Tanya’s first short subject film, Son of the Sun (2021), chronicles the explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020 and has been screened at renowned film festivals, including DIAGONALE ‘23, LE FIFA and IDFA. 

Tamara Kalo is a French-Lebanese interdisciplinary artist based in Riyadh. Her artistic practice explores the crossroads between land, body, home and collective memory. She uses distortion and fragmentation as techniques for image-creation and perception. In her works, which span photography, video, sculpture, textiles and performance art, Kalo focuses on the body as a relational standard of measurement in re-mapping memory, displacement and boundaries through memory and specificity of place. Her practice facilitates a fluid understanding of the temporary nature of human experience, in contrast with the vast, ancestral wisdom of landscapes and non-human beings. Often straddling the personal and the regional, she attempts to capture the fragility between events and their memory. 

Ana Belén García Mula is a curator, cultural manager and exhibition specialist with nearly twenty years of experience in the worlds of art and culture. She specializes in design, photography, exhibitions, publications and visitor experiences. She has led and managed complex international culture and exhibition projects in multinational environments, always in line with the curatorial approach. Formerly, she was responsible for the exhibitions at the Madrid Design Festival and PHotoEspaña (2017-2022) and an international traveling exhibition coordinator at La Fábrica (2014-2017).