Kulturnest - Where the Nest Roams
When we first unlocked the doors of our family’s early 20th-century house in 2023, we knew Kulturnest would never be just four walls and a roof. We wanted something porous. A place where art could come and go as freely as conversation drifts over coffee, where neighbours and strangers might sit together and leave changed in small, invisible ways.
It is no longer enough, here or anywhere, to believe that creativity survives by staying put. Some houses stand by remaining open, even when the streets outside are heavy with uncertainty. Some open by drifting. This is what we have been doing at Kulturnest since the beginning - hybrid, semi-nomadic by design, not by accident.
Long before we found the keys to this house, our practice was already hybrid, digital and physical intertwined. For more than twenty-five years, we have explored, locally and elsewhere, how screens and signals can carry voices across borders, first through online communities and digital publishing, then through collaborations that wove technology into artistic practice. We stepped into the conversation with AI from the moment OpenAI opened its gates to the public, not as late followers of a novelty but as curious witnesses, asking how machines might co‑write, co‑curate, or reveal unexpected forms that the human eye alone might overlook. Since then, we have shaped virtual exhibitions that live entirely online, hosted workshops and conversations on digital transformation and the arts, and published reflections that trace the fine lines where the human hand, the story, and the algorithm meet, and sometimes clash.
Our physical nest is still here: a cultural home tucked between city streets, where we hang new works on old walls, gather artists around tables, and carve small islands of possibility out of long afternoons. But these walls have grown wings too in the last two years, in a multiform way of being that moves partly online, partly onto borrowed rooftops, temporary rooms, shared courtyards, and distant screens; conversations that begin here and echo elsewhere.
This has never been just about surviving the storms of Lebanon’s shifting days, but about responding to how the art world itself is changing shape. The global art market now hums with contradictions: fair pavilions gleaming with the same names, yet new collectors appearing on screens rather than marble floors; auction houses holding onto legacy, yet smaller dealers turning to short-lived pop-ups, nomadic showcases, digital salons. More and more, what matters is not a permanent address, but the trust carried from one place to another, the sense that an artwork is not a commodity passing hands, but a signal passed between people who choose to look closely.
Locally, too, the map is fracturing and reforming. Beirut’s walls whisper with stories half-scrubbed by time and half-kept alive by those who refuse to abandon them. Artists here have long known how to make do, how to share spaces that open only when needed, how to improvise an exhibition on a street corner or a rooftop if a door stays shut. Kulturnest honours this spirit while building bridges to new ways of showing, selling, and exchanging - not only by asking who walks in, but who might linger online, who might find an artist’s work from another time zone, another life.
And AI, too, is neither saviour nor threat but an unfamiliar companion at our table. A tool to test the edges of what a curator sees, what a writer writes, what an artist trusts a machine to complete or ruin. We do not believe the machine replaces the hand, but we know the hand can learn something by watching the machine dream.
When our space is still, it is not asleep. It drifts through our eShop, our virtual rooms, the packages carefully wrapped and carried into other living rooms, other corners of the world where a fragment of our story comes to rest for a while. The artists who pass through Kulturnest do not stay behind glass. They carry a piece of us with them to their next studio, their next page, their next unfinished sentence
This is not a retreat from the world but a gentle refusal to sit still for it. We have seen what happens when walls pretend to protect art from the noise outside. We prefer to let the noise in and answer it with many forms: a painting that changes rooms, a market that appears for a day then disappears, a conversation that is half gallery, half garden, half screen. We are not one thing. We do not stand still enough to be defined by a single shape.
Perhaps that is our reason for being: to hold a space that feels like a home yet refuses to close in on itself. A nest that understands how to shelter and how to drift. An address in the suburbs of Beirut that is always slightly elsewhere, too: in the inbox, the group chat, the parcel of a print that arrives unannounced, the hush of an online room where art still breathes even when the power flickers.
If you come to our physical space on the days we keep the door unlocked, you will find us here, open just wide enough for whoever wants to step inside and add to this moving house. Or else, you will find us elsewhere, in a virtual corridor, an artwork crossing a border, a conversation with an unseen AI. Know that it is the same Kulturnest, just on the wing for a while. This is how we live these unfinished stories that bind us, not only by standing firm, but by remembering exactly when to move.
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, Kulturnest Co-Founder & CEO.