Kulturnest Thresholds Exhibition Curator's Note & Podcast
We tend to think of a threshold as something we cross. A door, a border, an entrance, an exit. There is supposedly a before and an after, a place we leave and another we reach. Yet so much of human experience unfolds somewhere in between, in that uncomfortable territory where what we once knew no longer holds, and what comes next has not quite taken shape.
Living in Lebanon, I have become particularly sensitive to these suspended states. We have spent decades navigating interrupted beginnings, uncertain endings, departures that were never meant to be permanent, and returns that do not always resemble homecomings. But thresholds are not exclusively Lebanese, nor are they necessarily dramatic. They also inhabit the smallest movements of our lives: an unspoken feeling, an old photograph, a decision postponed, a body changing, a memory resurfacing, a familiar place suddenly seen differently.
With Thresholds, I wanted to bring together artistic practices that approach these experiences without reducing them to a single narrative of loss, renewal, or transformation. The fifteen participating artists work with different materials, visual languages, and personal histories. Their works sometimes converse, sometimes diverge, and occasionally contradict one another. I find these differences particularly meaningful.
Four thematic constellations emerged through the selection of works. They are not separate compartments, and certainly not definitive interpretations. They offer possible ways of moving through the exhibition.
I. Passage and Crossing: The Geography of In-Between
Some thresholds can almost be touched. They are embedded in buildings, landscapes, routes, and the physical act of moving from one place to another.
In Joseph El Arid's work, architecture carries a weight that extends far beyond its structural function. The recurring arch becomes a place of tension between shelter and exposure, continuity and disruption. Searching for Hope, Between Silence and Collision, and The Crises evoke passages marked by personal experience and the wider fractures of Lebanese society.
Nada Raphael approaches space through photography, questioning not only what lies beyond a doorway but also the position of the person looking through it. In The Doorway Between, A Room with a View, and It's Not Where – It's Why, the physical environment becomes inseparable from perception, choice, and the circumstances that shape our movements.
The moment before crossing occupies a central place in Nadine Tabri's At the Doorstep and Leap of Faith. Both works invite reflection on that delicate interval between hesitation and action, when the possibility of change is present but its consequences remain unknown.
With Lily Naim, passage becomes less monumental and more fleeting. The Crossing, The Great Dive II, and Bouquet draw attention to movements and gestures that might otherwise escape our notice. Photography preserves something of their transience without arresting the questions they evoke.
In Katia Aoun Hage's Sunrise From An Airplane, the experience of transition expands into the sky itself. The shifting light, the altitude, the distance from the ground suggest an experience familiar to anyone who has watched one place disappear while another slowly emerges.
II. Inner States: Rupture, Silence and Becoming
Not every threshold is visible. Some of the most difficult crossings occur within us, often without a clear beginning or any certainty of arrival.
Elise Salameh, through Between, Emergence, and Becoming, explores transformation through abstraction and layered forms. Her works dwell in processes of change rather than their outcomes, allowing the unresolved to retain its complexity.
In Faten Hamdan's Where My Heart Belongs, Where the Soul Turns, and Whisper of the Bloom, emotional experience finds expression through intuitive compositions. Attachment, introspection, and the possibility of renewal coexist without necessarily reaching a comfortable resolution.
Layan Hariri's Anger, The Sunlight, and Against All Odds introduce another register, where confrontation and vulnerability meet an insistence on continuing. There is no requirement here to transform pain into reassurance. The works acknowledge tension as part of the experience of change.
The unsaid acquires a particular presence in Nathalie Bannout's Whispers of the Soul I & II, Unspoken, and Beneath the Silence. These works draw us toward what remains concealed, what struggles to find expression, and what may be communicated without words.
For Olga Safa, memory and release are closely intertwined. The Courage to Let Go, My Childhood Memories, and Voices approach the complicated relationship we maintain with our own histories. Leaving something behind does not necessarily mean ceasing to carry it.
Rania Issam Hamady's Between Worlds, The Call, and Follow Your Dreams acquire additional significance when considered alongside her return to artistic practice after periods of interruption and instability. Here, the act of creating is itself part of the crossing, a renewed engagement with possibilities that had remained suspended.
III. Memory, Identity and Belonging: What We Carry
Crossing a threshold does not erase what came before. Our bodies, habits, languages, relationships, and memories accompany us, whether we welcome them or not.
In Zahraa Ahmad Al Baba's The Lebanese Gossip, Every Table Has One, and The Ant and the Elephant, familiar situations and cultural references open onto questions of social identity and collective experience. Everyday Lebanese life, with its humour, codes, contradictions, and peculiar forms of intimacy, becomes material for artistic reflection.
Rima Ghanem approaches identity through the body, personal experience, and the contradictions involved in inhabiting different roles and expectations. Works including I Come in All Sizes, The Becoming – Protect Me From What I Want, Made of Wood and Wire, Salmon Sushi Extra Avocado, and MahWPah move between vulnerability, wit, discomfort, and self-examination. Becoming oneself is hardly a neat or linear affair.
Questions of belonging also surface elsewhere in the exhibition: in Olga Safa's childhood memories, Faten Hamdan's emotional landscapes, Joseph El Arid's architectural references, and Lily Naim's attention to ordinary gestures.
I am particularly interested in how these works complicate the idea of home. A place may remain ours long after we have left it. We may continue living somewhere without feeling entirely at home. Belonging can offer comfort, but it may also involve conflict, obligation, nostalgia, and the difficult negotiation between inherited identities and personal freedom.
IV. Collective Worlds: Tension and Imagined Futures
Thresholds also belong to cities, communities, and societies. The environments we inhabit are continually altered by decisions, conflicts, desires, and the imaginative possibilities we allow ourselves.
Michel Raad's Apparition I & II and Tower Metamorphosis series disturb familiar visual structures through surrealist transformations. Architecture and figures become unstable, opening a space in which the seemingly established order can be questioned and recomposed.
In Rouwaida Mallo's Vibrant Village Géométrie, The Urban Drop, and Metropolis of Dreaming Minds, geometry, colour, and urban forms suggest alternative ways of imagining collective environments. The city is approached not simply as a physical reality, but as a mutable space shaped by human imagination.
These explorations enter into conversation with the social dimensions of Joseph El Arid's architectural compositions, Zahraa Ahmad Al Baba's observations of Lebanese life, and Rima Ghanem's examination of identity and social expectations.
Collective thresholds are rarely crossed by everyone at the same pace, or under the same conditions. Some people are free to move; others are forced to. Some experience change as an opening, others as a loss. And the possibility of imagining another future does not erase the material realities that constrain it.
Remaining at the Threshold
What interests me in these fifteen artistic approaches is precisely their refusal to fit into one interpretation. The same image may suggest an opening to one visitor and an impasse to another. A gesture of departure may also be an act of preservation. Silence can signal withdrawal, but also concentration, refusal, or the simple absence of words adequate to an experience.
Nor do I wish to romanticize the condition of being in-between. In Lebanon, we know all too well that uncertainty can become exhausting when prolonged indefinitely, and that not every rupture produces something better. There is nothing inherently beautiful about displacement, dispossession, or having to reconstruct one's life repeatedly.
Yet the exhibition also allows other experiences to enter the conversation: curiosity, humour, attachment, imagination, tenderness, and the small decisions through which we negotiate change.
Thresholds does not offer a map of what lies ahead, nor does it ask the artists to provide answers on behalf of anyone else. I hope it creates an opportunity to spend time with their works, to notice what each makes visible or leaves unresolved, and to consider our own ways of inhabiting uncertain spaces.
After all, a threshold is not always something we can simply step across. Sometimes we remain there for a long while, carrying pieces of several worlds, uncertain which ones we can leave behind.
And perhaps that, too, deserves our attention.
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh
Kulturnest Co-Founder & CEO
Thresholds Exhibition's Curator
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