Please join us for the opening of our latest exhibition curated by Bassam Kahwagi as of September 30, 2025, in AUB Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum (Sidani street – Hamra). The exhibition Against the Window offers the most interesting painterly manifestations in Beirut and Lebanon today, according to Bassam's personal view. A committed painter himself, he is firmly convinced that painting remains one of the means of expressing one's humanity—our innermost feelings, doubts, uncertainties, and emotions. Bassam enthusiastically took on most of the roles in this exhibition: initiating the dialogue with the painters, selecting the works, writing the curatorial statement, designing the poster, creating the labels, and installing the exhibition. For all of this, we are deeply grateful.
Curatorial Statement:
In this time of genocide, we present at the AUB Saleeby Museum an exhibition of paintings titled Against the Window to mark the living present against all odds.
The paintings selected for this exhibition are neither heroic nor do they deploy the tropes of history painting. Rather, they are experimental and provisional. They foreground the searching brushstroke, the hesitations of a line, the restarts, doubts and attempts at grasping an image out of the flood of pictures.
Against the Window, we stand uneasily, for we know that the view has been demolished, and the glass-panes shattered. Still, perhaps, through this window a breeze stirs, bringing with it the sounds of a conversation, words of wisdom or possibly a ray of light that transforms the interior.
This exhibition is an invitation to linger with the seemingly inconsequential, to look and see matter deposited on precarious surfaces and again insist that this world is worth protecting.
