What We Keep Open - Arts and Culture in Lebanon in Times of War
There are moments in Lebanon when talking about art feels almost inappropriate, not because art has lost its meaning, but because the scale of what people are living through seems to push every other language aside. In spring and summer 2026, the country is again carrying too much at once: bombardments, displacement, damaged and destroyed towns and villages, returning families who do not know whether return will last, businesses reopening with hesitation, people keeping bags packed even while sweeping glass from their floors, and an economy that had already exhausted most households long before this latest violence entered their lives.
This is the ground on which culture now stands, and it is neither clean nor comfortable. It is a ground of interrupted plans, reduced budgets, cancelled openings, sudden mourning, nervous roads, unstable electricity, frightened children, absent friends, artists who cannot afford materials, visitors who want to come but cannot always move, and spaces that try to stay open without pretending that staying open is easy. The war has worsened a crisis that was already economic, social, political and infrastructural, with businesses destroyed or shut down, inflation and fuel pressures deepening, tourism collapsing, and the country’s already weak electricity supply placing yet another burden on households and small institutions.
And yet, to say that art is irrelevant in such a moment would be to misunderstand what art and culture actually do when a society is under pressure. They do not replace shelter, medicine, reconstruction, justice, salaries or political responsibility, and they should never be used as a decorative excuse for the absence of these things. What they do is more modest and, in some ways, more stubborn: they keep experience from disappearing into statistics, they give form to what people are otherwise asked to swallow quietly, they create a place where memory can be held before it is rewritten or erased, and they allow people to meet one another without being reduced only to fear, exhaustion, loss or need.
Lebanon has known for a long time that war does not end when the noise decreases, because it continues in architecture, in family stories, in bodies, in silences, in schoolbooks that avoid too much, in archives that disappear, in neighborhoods that are rebuilt too quickly or not rebuilt at all, and in the difficulty of agreeing on what happened. This is why contemporary Lebanese art has so often worked with absence, fragments, documents, ruins, maps, testimony, fiction and doubt, not simply to “represent” war, but to question how memory is made and who has the power to organize it.
That older conversation has not become abstract; it has become painfully current again. When homes are destroyed, what disappears is not only walls, windows and furniture, but also photographs, notebooks, kitchen objects, religious icons, plants, carpets, school drawings, inherited tools, the smell of a staircase, the particular sound of a street at night, and the small arrangements through which people recognize their lives. When a village is erased, the loss is beyond private; it is shared, because memory in Lebanon is attached to places that carry family, region, language, confession, labor, migration, celebration and grief all at once.
In this landscape, Kulturnest’s ongoing exhibition Havens, open until August 14 and bringing together 18 artists, feels especially close to the moment because the word “haven” cannot be used lightly in Lebanon today. A haven is not a fantasy of safety, and it is not the kind of comfort that asks people to forget the catastrophe outside the door; it is closer to a temporary clearing, a held space, a garden, a room, a gathering, a work of art, a conversation, a threshold where one can breathe for a while without denying the reasons breathing has become difficult. Kulturnest, as an independent hybrid cultural space in Lebanon, belongs to a fragile but necessary ecology of places that are trying to connect artists and publics through exhibitions, workshops, mediation, markets, educational formats and encounters, and its significance now lies less in claiming to solve anything than in insisting that cultural life can still be organized with care while the country is being pulled toward fear and depletion.
The word “space” matters here, because Lebanon’s crisis is also a crisis of places where people can gather without being consumed by consumption, bureaucracy, propaganda or emergency; where someone explains an artist’s process to a visitor; where a young artist learns how to speak about a practice; where a collector may be encouraged to look beyond decoration; where an artwork is not reduced to content for a feed; where a child or student realizes that seeing is also something one learns; and where a conversation can begin between people who might otherwise never meet. In times of war, such spaces may look small compared with the scale of destruction, but their smallness is not the same as insignificance.
The difficulty is that the people maintaining these spaces are often operating at the edge of what is sustainable. Artists are asked to produce meaning while dealing with grief, displacement, unstable income, expensive materials, fragmented attention, weak sales, limited grants, and the pressure to be constantly visible online. Cultural workers are asked to curate, host, write, mediate, install, document, fundraise, communicate, comfort, educate and improvise, often with teams that are too small and resources that do not match the work being done. Independent spaces carry the costs of electricity, maintenance, communication, installation, documentation, hospitality, digital tools, transport, insurance, storage and basic administration, while the public often sees only the opening night, the finished wall text, the photograph of the room, or the few seconds of a reel that make everything appear more effortless than it is.
Lebanon has become a country of what some researchers call “patchworking” amid failing infrastructure, meaning that people and organizations constantly assemble provisional systems to meet basic needs when formal systems do not reliably protect them. Although most researches focus on everyday security and digital and human rights organizations, the same idea helps describe cultural work today: generators, solar batteries, WhatsApp coordination, borrowed equipment, volunteer labor, hybrid programming, private appointments, shared transport, postponed events, unpaid emotional labor, improvised storage, and the endless quiet calculations that allow a workshop, exhibition or screening to happen despite everything around it. This patchworking shows ingenuity, but it also exposes how much responsibility has been pushed onto people who are already carrying too much.
One of the most damaging habits in talking about Lebanon is to turn all of this into a flattering story of resilience. There is courage, of course, and there is generosity, discipline, imagination, and a kind of stubborn social intelligence that should never be dismissed. But resilience can become a cruel word when it allows the world to admire survival instead of asking why survival has to be performed so often, and it can become especially cruel when artists and cultural workers are expected to transform collapse into beauty without being given the conditions to live decently from their work. A more honest language would say that continuing is not always noble; sometimes it is exhausting, sometimes it is angry, sometimes it is practical, and sometimes it is simply what people do because the alternative would be to let the field go silent.
What culture needs now is not praise alone, but support that understands the material conditions of cultural life. It means paying artists for talks, workshops, performances, commissions, images, writing and expertise. It means buying work when possible, including smaller works, prints, editions and objects that allow broader publics to participate without turning art into disposable merchandise. It means schools and universities treating exhibitions and artists’ practices as part of education, not as occasional decoration. It means companies approaching artists with respect rather than extracting creativity for branding. It means donors and institutions supporting long-term cultural structures (small and medium-size as they are the most marginalized) and not only emergency visibility. It means audiences showing up when they can, not out of charity, but because cultural spaces become stronger when people use them seriously.
The public also needs to be invited in without being intimidated. One of the urgent tasks of galleries and cultural hubs today is mediation: making art approachable without flattening it, explaining process without overexplaining meaning, allowing people to feel that they can ask questions even if they do not know the vocabulary of contemporary art. In a country where class divides often determine who feels entitled to enter cultural spaces, this work is political in the broadest sense, because it says that art is not only for those who already know how to behave in front of it. It says that looking, interpreting, remembering and imagining are public capacities, and that a more conscious society cannot be built if culture is treated as a private language for the few.
This is where Havens can be understood not as an escape from Lebanon’s reality, but as a way of staying close to it without being swallowed whole. 18 artists gathered under such a title do not have to offer one answer to what shelter means, because shelter itself is unstable now: it can be domestic, psychological, ecological, spiritual, architectural, bodily, communal, imaginary, or lost. It can be a place one returns to and no longer recognizes, a place one builds briefly with others, a place one carries in memory, or a place that exists only because someone has made time to listen. In the middle of a catastrophic period, an exhibition like this can remind visitors that the need for refuge is not weakness, and that seeking a haven does not mean refusing to see the ruins; it may mean refusing to let the ruins decide the entire meaning of life.
There is no need to end with a sentimental promise, because people in Lebanon have heard too many promises and have lived through too many versions of “normal” that were never truly normal. The situation is hard, and in many ways it is catastrophic, and no responsible cultural text should pretend otherwise. But there is a kind of hope that does not lie, because it is not based on optimism; it is based on attention, on the fact that someone is still documenting, someone is still opening a door, someone is still teaching children to draw, someone is still repairing a projector, someone is still writing about an artist’s work, someone is still preserving an archive, someone is still inviting people into a room where their grief does not have to be useful or beautiful.
That may not be enough, but it is not nothing. In Lebanon today, culture is one of the ways people keep a relation to place, to memory, to one another, and to the possibility of a future that is not only an extension of emergency. It will not save the country by itself, and it should not be asked to carry what politics, law, and public institutions have failed to carry, but it can keep open the human spaces without which reconstruction would mean only concrete, roads, and accounts. What we keep open now matters, because every open cultural space, every honest artwork, every careful exhibition, every workshop, every conversation that resists erasure is also a refusal to let catastrophe become the only author of the Lebanese story.
Dr. Pamela Chrabieh
Kulturnest co-founder & CEO