September | أيلول

September navigates memory, embodiment, and relationality in a country suspended in recurring cycles of war. Focused on the Southern Suburbs of Beirut during the Lebanon/Israel war of September–November 2024, this exhibition traces how violence reshapes place and collective history. 

Using an investigative methodology, the project maps evacuation orders and airstrikes that occurred in the artist’s neighbourhood, transforming the precarious digital traces of war—social media posts, livestreams, mobile alerts, satellite imagery, and witness footage—into a material archive. Buildings targeted by airstrikes are cut out of the canvas, memorializing their erasure; a series of gouache paintings preserve the traces of demolished neighbourhoods, streets, and storefronts, and the lives that occupied them. 

Rather than reproduce spectacles of destruction for a distant gaze, the exhibition transmutes the same surveillance tools and networked images that enabled the strikes. September proposes painting as a form of counter-mapping and as an archive of war: a way to re-materialize what has been flattened, to insist on the visibility of what has been erased, and to claim a space for individual and collective memory in the face of ongoing occupation and future wars that are always already here.

presented at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, CA

with the support of: Curating Change