Lebanese Artists Whose Work Is Shaped By Personal Experience

by Barbara Yakimchuk

Lebanese Artists Whose Work Is Shaped By Personal Experience

9 Dec 2025

All artists draw from somewhere — and anyone who has ever tried to create on a day when nothing quite lands knows how impossible it is to force inspiration. Art doesn’t respond to pressure; it comes from a deeper place, shaped by love, excitement, loneliness, or even grief.

Often these impulses are tied to where you come from: your country, the people who cross your path, the landscape you grow up in. But sometimes they reach even further inward, rooted in childhood memories, family histories, and the stories you quietly carry. It is a bit like turning the pages of your diary into something you can share with the world.

Which brings us to some — not all, of course, otherwise this article would never end — Lebanese artists who do exactly that: artists who fold their own lives into their work, creating pieces that feel honest, intimate, and deeply human. The kind you might find yourself following on Instagram before you have even reached the end of the list.

Tarek Haddad

Tarek Haddad is a Lebanese photographer whose work sits at a beautiful intersection between the personal and the collective. Through small, often incidental moments in his own life, he taps into emotions shared by an entire generation — feelings of place, longing, loss, and displacement.

What stands out in his practice is that his ideas rarely come from abstract thought — they usually begin with something real. Lost & Found, for example, was inspired by an email he accidentally received from Jeri Poll, the receptionist at ENSP: a simple photograph of a lost item waiting to be claimed. This small moment made him think about what it actually feels like to settle into a new place — something that is very real for him now that he literally lives between two cities, Beirut and Arles.

Similarly, the Temporary City Mountains series came from him walking around an unknown street in Helsinki — urban views that reminded him of home, revealing how he continually looks for echoes of Lebanon wherever he goes. It speaks to a quiet homesickness — what he describes in the project’s text as the loss of the familiar — and shows how his work turns personal longing into a visual language that many people recognise in themselves.

Source: @tkhaddad.com

Ali Cherri

Ali Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976, which already says a great deal about the core concerns in his work — as he belongs to the generation that lived through and after the Lebanese Civil War. His family stayed in the country during those years, and it is perhaps because of this that themes of loss, violence and trauma appear so strongly throughout his practice.

His art often moves between two main territories: the reality of war — with all its scars and brutality — and the question of history itself: how it is written, who gets to shape it, and how the stories of the past are framed or silenced. These aren't abstract ideas for him; they are shaped by lived experience and the psychological traces it leaves behind.

Cherri works across many forms — film, sculpture, installation and graphic design — yet his narratives remain anchored in the same questions. Witnessing violence and displacement from a young age led him, many years later, to create Of Men and Gods and Mud, the video installation that won him the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale. Having grown up close to death and its consequences, he continues to ask: “How do we deal with the traces of the dead?” and “How do we make these objects speak, or become part of our discourse?” answering them in his film The Digger. He explores how history, memory and the remnants of the past continue to shape the present.

Instagram: @ali.cherri

Lamia Joreige

Lamia Joreige is another artist whose path was shaped by the Lebanese Civil War, though her story differs from the previous Ali: she left the country in 1983, shortly after the war began, and returned many years later. That early departure introduced a different narrative into her work — one marked not only by the violence of the war itself, but by the memories, distance and displacement it left behind.

Her practice spans painting, video and film, photography, drawing and installation, but the heart of her work lies in her use of archival material. She often blends her own memories with documents, photographs and artefacts from others, creating works that sit somewhere between personal reflection and collective history.

In Under-Writing Beirut, for example, she revisits present-day locations through archival images, film and text — layering how she remembers the parts of her city with how they appear now. In One Night of Sleep, the focus becomes entirely intimate: photograms made from her own body lying on photographic paper, an exploration of time, presence and the thin line between life and its documentation.

Her work is less about illustrating history and more about tracing how it is felt, remembered and continually rewritten.

Source: lamiajoreige.com

Akram Zaatari

When we speak about Lebanese artists and their personal roots, it is almost inevitable that the conversation returns to the war they lived through. But for Akram Zaatari, it isn’t only about the conflict itself. His work also grows out of a private habit he carried from childhood — collecting small fragments of life: letters, photographs, notes, and the everyday traces of the people around him.

So memory, in all its complexity, is his central theme. (In this sense, he shares something with Ali Cherri — the same historical period pushing artists toward similar questions.) Zaatari’s work often asks: Who gets to write history? Whose version of events becomes “true”? And while much of his practice deals with collective memory — many of his projects are deeply personal.

Take This Day, a film shaped by his own experience growing up in a border region during the war — it is woven together with his travel notes and photographic archives. Or Time Capsule, a photographic installation built from material he helped gather over many years, exploring how people across the Middle East have pictured themselves and their world.

Through these works, Zaatari turns private collecting into a form of archaeology — transforming personal and regional memory into something shared and complex.

Source: artforum.com

Marya Kazoun

Marya Kazoun was born in Beirut in 1976, and her family left the country eight years later. So while traces of the Lebanese war appear in her work, they are transformed into wider reflections on the fragility of the world we all inhabit.

Movement between countries and cultures is woven deeply into her practice — and for good reason. At the age of eight she left Lebanon for Switzerland, then later moved to Canada, followed by New York and finally Venice. This constant shifting of place and identity — both physical and emotional — is mirrored in the materials she chooses: fragile glass, fabric, thread. Her sense of fluid identity shapes her visual language too, often resulting in hybrid, almost mythical creatures.

Her recent work First Act takes inspiration from a traditional Nativity scene, but imagines a different kind of birth — not of a child, but of a possible new world. It highlights blurred boundaries and shared vulnerabilities.

Source: maryakazoun.blogspot.com

by Barbara Yakimchuk