Beirut Art Center, in collaboration with British Council Lebanon and Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, is pleased to announce the opening of Port Cities: Fragments of Maritime Routes, on Thursday 9 October 2025, at 6pm.
Bringing together commissioned works by Mohamed Abdelkarim, Laila Hida, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Siska, the exhibition explores the port as both material reality and metaphor. It began with residencies in Liverpool in 2024, where the artists engaged with maritime infrastructures and histories of trade, slavery and migration. Each then returned to their own shoreline—Alexandria, Tunis, Marrakech and Beirut—to ask what it means to live with these legacies today.
Conceived as a traveling project, Port Cities shifts with each host city, carrying traces while changing form. Following presentations in Liverpool and Marrakech, the Beirut edition takes on a particular urgency: here, the port is not a distant memory but a living wound. The subtitle Fragments of Maritime Routes reflects Beirut’s fractured geographies of circulation—broken passages that shape its relationship to the sea, while suggesting the possibility of recomposition.
Press release from Beirut Art Center
Image: Installation view from Port Cities: Fragments of Maritime Routes at Beirut Art Center, 2025. Image courtesy of Beirut Art Center
