17 July 2025 — 20 June 2027

Becoming Icon

How does an artwork attain the status of an icon? What does this passage into visibility, or its refusal, reveal about the narratives we construct, the memories we activate and the communities we shape? Drawing on the Sursock Museum's collection, enriched by public and private loans, the exhibition examines dynamics of recognition, exclusion and legitimisation in modern and contemporary art. Some works emerge as visual landmarks charged with evocative power; others remain on the margins, ignored, displaced or forgotten. Identity figures, sites of memory, pivotal events and recurring motifs are forms that crystallise collective stakes. By approaching them as points of tension, the exhibition offers a critical reading of what makes an icon. Throughout the exhibition, selected definitions (form, symbol, circulation, community, model, marker, absorption, emblem, diffusion or unity) appear and reappear, raising questions about the process of iconisation and the museum's role in shaping visual memory. Becoming an icon is not merely a matter of reception, but an active, conflicted and deeply political process. In resonance with the collective narratives carried by any museum institution, certain works reactivate inherited forms, make marginalised memories visible, or interrogate the artwork's very capacity to embody. Curated by Yasmine Chemali, with scenography by Atelier Meem Noun and Jacques Abou Khaled. Yasmine Chemali is a curator and art historian, and since 2020 the Director of the Center of Photography in Mougins, France. She was previously head of the Fouad Debbas collection in Beirut and, from 2014 to 2020, head of the modern and contemporary art collections at the Sursock Museum.

Sursock Museum