Beirut

Jisr el Wati

4 galleries · 0 museums · 0 places

About this district

An industrial zone on the banks of the mostly-dry Beirut River, on the southeastern edge of the centre, and the home of Beirut's non-commercial, experimental art institutions. Jisr el Wati is garages, warehouses and the weekend flea market of Souk al-Ahad — and among them, the kunsthalle-style spaces that gave the city its first public homes for contemporary art. There's nothing pretty about the setting; the significance is entirely in what the spaces do. This is where art is discussed and produced, not sold.

Galleries

Museums

No published museums in this district yet.

Places

No published places in this district yet.

A massive granite column shaft under a stone arch, seen from below, with the dome springing above it.
Editorial

Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend

A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.

Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.

Abstract geometric composition of interlocking angular forms in layered planes of colour.
Editorial

Women of Arab Abstraction

The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.

Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.