Port Cities: Fragments of Maritime Routes – The Beirut Edition

This exhibition brings together new works by Mohamed Abdelkarim, Laila Hida, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, and Siska, four artists who approach the port as both material reality and metaphor. Their projects grew from residencies in Liverpool in 2024, where the artists engaged with the city’s maritime infrastructures and its entanglement in slavery, trade, and migration. Each returned to their own shoreline—Alexandria, Tunis, Marrakech, and Beirut—asking what it means to live with the sediments of these legacies today. 

Conceived as a traveling exhibition, Port Cities does not move intact; it drifts. With every host city, it carries traces while shifting its form. After Liverpool and Marrakech, Beirut inflects the project with a different urgency. Here, the port is not a distant memory but an open wound. Devastated in 2020, it remains a scar at the city’s core. To present these works in Beirut is to enter into dialogue with a public for whom the sea is both livelihood and loss, both escape and entrapment. For this edition, the exhibition takes the title Fragments of Maritime Routes. The phrase reflects Beirut’s fractured geographies of circulation. It acknowledges the broken passages that shape the city’s relationship to the sea while also suggesting the possibility of recomposition. Each work is a fragment in its own right, yet together they evoke stories drawn from rupture as much as from connection. 

At Beirut Art Center, the exhibition extends the conversations sparked by the rooftop program Water In My Mouth, which used water as a lens to think about sustainability, fragility, and collective resilience. Here, those questions return to the shoreline, asking what kinds of imaginaries might emerge from the city’s liquid thresholds. 

The four commissions echo and challenge these questions: 

Abdelkarim’s Nobody Remembered the Ark, Said the Sea stages a speculative chorus of creatures speaking from the sea, unsettling human-centred histories. 

Hida’s Reversed Landscape excavates colonial power hidden in the display of plants and gardens. 

Kaabi-Linke’s Heartbeat Wavelines sutures Liverpool’s ruined docks to Tunis’s abandoned hotels, proposing ruin as a transnational architecture. 

Siska’s $₮I₺₺ ₩₳₸€₨ ₹U₦ D££₽ moves through the unstable terrain of memory, migration, and water as both surface and depth. 

Together, these works refuse the port as a stable image. Instead, they propose it as a shifting imaginary: fractured, haunted, and yet generative. In Beirut, they gather not to conclude but to circulate, reminding us that ports, like histories, never stand still. 

Exhibition Dates
9 October – 6 December 2025
Beirut Art Center 
Port Cities
A collaborative project initiated by Liverpool Arab Arts Festival and British Council MENA 

Previously Presented
Le18, Marrakech – May to June 2025 

Current Edition
Beirut Art Center – 9 October to 6 December 2025 

Acknowledgements

This project has travelled and evolved thanks to the creativity, commitment, and vision of many contributors: 

LAAF Team – Anne Thwaite, Toufik Douib, Jack Welsh 

Artivator Fellow – Lyn Dabbous 

British Council Team – Marc Mouarkech, Zeinab Allaw, Abir Aboulmanadel, Mohamad Amine AlKohli 

Le18 Marrakech Team – Laila Hida, Meryem Fekhari, Leila Sahli, Youssef Zro  

With heartfelt thanks to everyone who has shaped each chapter along the way.