Aftermaths Hybrid Collective Exhibition
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Kulturnest is delighted to invite the public to the opening of its fourth hybrid collective exhibition, “Aftermaths”, taking place on Saturday, September 27, 2025, from 6 to 9 PM in Sin-el-Fil (Lebanon) and simultaneously in the metaverse (virtual exhibition).
Curated by Kulturnest co-founder & CEO Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, this exhibition gathers 27 local and international creatives, including poets and visual artists from the London Arts-Based Research Centre (LABRC), in a powerful dialogue on resilience, memory, and imagination.
Exhibition Theme
“Aftermaths” explores what follows traumas, collapse, or any experience one undergoes - whether positive, negative, or ambiguous; through war, displacement, climate crisis, identity shifts, or intimate ruptures. This exhibition is both a mirror and a continuation of the themes Kulturnest has explored since its inception. Questions of memory, identity, history, diversity, inclusivity, fortitude, and metamorphosis have been at the heart of our programming, from previous workshops and hybrid exhibitions - such as Culture and Digital Transformation (2023), Unyielding (2023), Art Her Way (2024), Urban Canvas (2024), and Embodied Realities (2025) -, to numerous cultural activities, including conferences and publications, that reflect our commitment to positioning the arts as a space for critical dialogue, healing, and social imagination. “Aftermaths” emerges from this trajectory, weaving the threads of our past initiatives into renewed individual and collective reflections.
Featured Artists
The participating artists, spanning emerging, mid-career, and established voices, employ a wide array of materials, techniques, and styles. Their works range from acrylic, oil, and mixed media on canvas to neon installations, sculptures, photography, weaving art, digital art, hybrid art, and poetry. Together, they create a kaleidoscope of perspectives on survival, continuity, and transformation.
Abdulrahman Ghalayini, Adam Wyeth, Anthony Anaxagorou, Chloe Campbell, Dana Mufti, Georges Haddad, Gilbert Loutfi, Gloria Barbar Assily, Hedy Habra, Jeanne d'Arc Bou-Younes, Jessica Hajjar, Joseph Ghobeira, Katia Aoun Hage, Lara Youakim, Laura Taleb, Lucy Poshoghlian/ARDZIV, Maria-Sophia Christodoulou, Nadia Wardeh, Nada Raphael, Nadine Tabri, Olga Safa, Ovsanna Yepremian Telfeyan, Pamela Chrabieh, Rima Ghanem, Roula-Maria Dib, Salma Ahmad Caller, and Youmna Jazzar Medlej.
Dates & Access
Opening Night: Saturday, September 27, 2025, 6–9 PM (Kulturnest - Sin-el-Fil, Lebanon & virtually).
On View at Kulturnest (Physical Exhibition): October 1 – November 27, Wednesdays to Saturdays, 2–7 PM.
Virtual Exhibition: accessible online from September 27 onward.
Free entrance for both exhibitions - physical and virtual.
CURATOR'S NOTE
Not every break is a wound. Some ruptures are thresholds we choose; others are imposed and become trauma. Our upcoming "Aftermaths" hybrid collective art exhibition follows the personal mark and the collective echo.
The exhibition brings together 27 voices in a polyphonic conversation on the recomposition/change of lives, bodies, and languages after waves, shock, loss, or any transformational event. Across painting, neon, weaving, ceramics, photography, illustration, hybrid/digital works, and poetry, intimate diaries stand beside civic echoes - family archives next to city walls -, so meanings cross-pollinate rather than harden.
"Aftermaths" moves through three converging currents: what remains, how we carry it, and what we dare to imagine next.
I- What remains.
In still, symbolic photographs, Abdulrahman Ghalayini distils the residue of time - Ashes of Time, for instance, suspends a scorched timepiece between past and trace. While Jessica Hajjar’s images of abandoned homes and struck landscapes keep open the wound where “life froze.” Youmna Jazzar Medlej’s lens turns restoration into a parable: broken fragments reassembled, the question of whether humans can be mended left deliberately unanswered. Hedy Habra’s persona poem Once Upon a Time, an Olive Tree lets a tree remember elders cut and burned, its roots speaking the quiet grammar of endurance. Nada Raphaël’s Burned Alive and In the End map Lebanon’s aftermaths across forests and walls - where ashes, erasures, and fractures linger, yet where resilience and memory carve out fragile continuities.
II- How we carry it.
Text and voice hold aftermath in the body: Adam Wyeth’s about:blank (animation poem film) fuses poetics, myth, and AI to inhabit post-collapse interiority; Anthony Anaxagorou’s poem Float stays with language at the lip of grief; Chloe Campbell’s elegy begins at the brink - “World, will you still be beautiful…”; Maria-Sophia Christodoulou’s “Warning: Distressing Content” refuses silence where intimate and geopolitical violence entangle; Nadia Wardeh’s Hymn of Death walks the threshold between departure and return; Roula-Maria Dib’s “Ella Ma Temro’ Nasmi” braids hill-paths, kitchen scents, and diaspora into a breeze that cools the wound. Rima Ghanem’s ink drawings stage the mind’s cages and the possibility - sometimes the impossibility - of flight.
III- What we dare to imagine next.
Material practices translate fracture into form: Dana Mufti’s ceramics carve and cast war’s remains - spiked blooms, broken headlines, a red flower under rubble - seeking tenderness inside ruin. Laura Taleb’s woven Memory of the Present holds architecture as moving memory, listening for “ghosts of the future” in circular, breathing rhythms. Georges Haddad reclaims neon as feeling - Mosaic ignites a pre-blast Beirut where chaos and order co-glow beneath the word “Beirut.” Joseph Ghobeira’s Sasha and AZ - eye, wing, wandering body - haunt the now with unresolved dreams.
Painting and hybrid image-making recompose vision: Gilbert Loutfi’s Blurry Visions hovers between real and fabricated recall in an age of AI; Gloria Barbar Assily crowns Fairuz in gold while mourning a mother’s unspeakable loss; Katia Aoun Hage’s And after comes faith walks among ruins toward the discipline of belief; Lara Youakim’s Urban Metamorphosis renders a city in flux - construction, deconstruction, resilience; Lucy Pochoglian/ARDZIV layers urgent color fields where scars and breath co-occupy the canvas; Nadine Tabri’s Hope cleaves darkness from light to insist on a future; Olga Safa’s Voices turns resonance into pattern, a chorus of whispers and declarations; Ovsanna Yepremian Telfeyan paints the delicate ache of Separation - vases as vessels of unspoken feeling. Salma Ahmad Caller’s photographic suite The Album of Afterlives, sutures family archives into colonial texts, letting ghosts and double exposures contest the record.
At the exhibition’s heart, the hybrid icon Unbroken by Pamela Chrabieh bears the crackle of survival - faces as witnesses carry scars and continuities. Jeanne d’Arc Bou-Younes’s sculptural Leave me Be answers with sovereign stillness: a right to rest after battle.
As a hybrid exhibition, Aftermaths refuses closure. It is a threshold where remembrance becomes method, craft becomes care, and imagination becomes infrastructure. Here, the residue of harm or any sort of change is neither denied nor fetishized; it is worked through image, line, fiber, neon, clay, and breath into forms of meaning that look forward. From silence to chorus, shard to weave, we witness not the end of a story but the making of many beginnings.
If you are in Lebanon, come to Kulturnest and meet these artworks in person. If you are elsewhere, enter the virtual rooms; distance alters the path, not the encounter.
By Dr. Pamela Chrabieh - Curator, Artist, Author, Academic, Consultant, Kulturnest Co-Founder & CEO.
A Glimpse into the Aftermaths Virtual Exhibition:
Poetry and Visual Art Excerpts - Virtual Display Only:
Exhibition's Podcast & Explanatory Video - for Education Purposes:
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Founded in 2023 by Drs. Pamela & Michèle Chrabieh, Kulturnest is a hybrid cultural space and creative hub rooted in Lebanon yet globally connected, at the crossroads of the physical and digital realms. With a network of over 215 artists - local and international | emerging, mid-way, and established -, Kulturnest curates physical and virtual exhibitions, art markets, workshops, and cultural events. It also operates a concept store, an online gallery/eShop, a co-working space, and a café, while leasing its venue for meetings, workshops, and events. With each initiative, Kulturnest has sought to amplify diverse voices, build bridges across communities, and expand access to art beyond traditional borders.
Contact
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