the only body that can hold our world’s grief
2025
currently on view at Beirut Art Center until 28-02-2026
“The only body that can hold our world’s grief” is a mourning ritual culminating in a lumen photograph made within a camera obscura the artist constructed in a vacant building overlooking the corniche in Saida. The image was exposed over three days, tracing the passage of sunlight as it entered the room from the exterior landscape. The resulting scene is fragmented across twenty tiled and stitched sheets of paper, forming an installation that evokes a portal or radiant sun, within which the sea appears to be set ablaze.
Across cultures, three days mark the most intense phase of mourning — a liminal span between loss and release. The work turns to the Mediterranean Sea as both subject and witness: a body of water that has carried travelers for centuries yet has also claimed innumerable lives in its depths. It is a vast, seemingly boundless body that connects lands recently dissociated. The sea offers a visual and sensorial repose — its horizon grounding, its rhythmic waves and charged ions providing regulating physiological and emotional relief.
Through this gesture of sun exposure and the material sensitivity of the silver gelatin paper, the photograph becomes an act of durational mourning — an attempt to locate a body vast enough to contain collective grief, and to register loss not as a singular event but as an ongoing condition embedded within landscape, light, and time.