If we were to illustrate strength, unity, and the quiet power of resilience, we would probably turn to the Lebanese people. No, I don’t mean other countries wouldn’t work — many could stand in that place — but once you have spoken to the Lebanese, you begin to understand just how much love and pain can coexist in the same breath.

They have lived through a lot: several wars, the 2020 explosion, and this constant state of being somewhere between love and peace, and fear and sorrow.

So here, we don’t try to over-explain. Instead, we sit with Lebanese artists — quietly — and move through their work, trying to understand how they keep going after difficult times. What continues to shape them?

More often than not, it comes back to the same place: their city.

Randa Mirza is a Lebanese photographer whose work is deeply tied to memory.

She returns to Lebanon through her lens again and again. One of her most striking projects, View From Home, came about almost by accident. During the Covid lockdown, Randa began photographing Beirut from her window, using binoculars — capturing distant fragments of streets and buildings. It started as something simple, almost meditative.

Then came August 4. The explosion — the images that travelled across the world, and the date that has stayed with Lebanon ever since.

Randa returned to the same position, the same tools, and began photographing again. But when the images — taken just a few months apart — were placed side by side, they formed something much heavier: a quiet, unintended “before and after” that you wish had never existed.

The project isn’t about the event itself. It is about memory — about what lingers, about how a city carries what has happened to it, and about that fragile, almost stubborn hope that something like this might never happen again.

Tagreed Darghouth is a Lebanese painter whose work feels like a quiet manifesto shaped by the reality she has been living through. She speaks about war not in a literal way, but emotionally. As she puts it, war can destroy, damage, and distort — but it can never fully erase what matters. Ideas, once they exist, don’t disappear. Like traces left on canvas, they continue beyond us, becoming symbols of resilience and patience.

Most of her work isn’t about war directly, but about what is left behind — the texture of life after, and everything that continues to exist despite it.

There is, however, one body of work where the connection becomes more explicit: Ballots to Bullets. In this series, Darghouth reflects on the absurdity of the modern world, where the aesthetics of war are polished, packaged, and almost sold back to us like consumer objects. It gently makes you rethink the things we are used to believing — freedom, justice, progress. What do they really mean in our lives?

Nour Flayhan is a Lebanese illustrator whose work carries a kind of warmth that feels almost physical — like something gently holding you through the screen. She draws people and moments with care and softness, yet there is always a quiet sense of sorrow underneath. Though she wasn’t born in Lebanon, she was raised there, which is why so much of her work naturally returns to the country.

One of the moments she keeps coming back to is 4 August 2020. She marks it each year — not by showing the event itself, but through the stories of others, through memory, through small personal traces people hold onto.

And then, of course, there is the war. She speaks about it through everyday life — the strain, the tension, the constant background noise people learn to live with. She touches on loss, but never loudly. And alongside it, there is always gratitude — towards those who helped, who stayed, who carried others through.

Her works are about people, and for people — a quiet form of care, and a reminder that even after the hardest moments, there is still something good that remains.

Towards the end of this selection is Lamia Joreige — an artist who seems to believe that to live after is, above all, to remember. In 1999, she began a long-term project with a deceptively simple title: Objects of War, dedicated to the Lebanese Civil War. What makes it unique is that, even decades later, she continues to treat it as something ongoing — not closed and not resolved.

The process itself is quiet, but powerful. Over the years, she has interviewed people who lived through the war, asking each of them the same question: what is one object you associate with that time?

The answers are never grand — just small, familiar things. An identity card. A teddy bear. A photograph. A Sony Walkman. And three years later: a radio, a candle, a perfume bottle, a simple drawing of a home.

On the surface, these objects feel ordinary, almost insignificant. But each one carries something deeply personal — memory, loss, fear, fragments of everyday life interrupted.

In her installations, these objects are shown alongside video testimonies, allowing them to speak quietly, but with weight. Joreige doesn’t reconstruct the war itself. She gathers what remains of it — small, intimate pieces of memory — and lets them exist in the present.