Suni‘a Bisihrika—“Made With Your Magic”—arrived at Beirut Art Center on July 30 as the second chapter of an ongoing artistic project conceived by curator Tarek Abou El Fetouh and initiated by Dream City Festival in Tunis. First presented in Tunis in 2025, the project takes on a different form in each city it enters. Following Beirut, future chapters are set to continue in Damascus, Jeddah, and Baghdad.
At the center of the project is an unlikely starting point: the Arabic maqām.
The exhibition takes its title from a mnemonic phrase used to remember the eight principal Arabic maqāms: Saba, Nahawand, ‘Ajam, Bayati, Sika, Hijaz, Rast, and Kurd. But despite borrowing its conceptual framework from music, Suni‘a Bisihrika is not, strictly speaking, a musical exhibition.
“The exhibition looks beyond the aesthetic function of the maqāms,” Abou El Fetouh explains. Instead, it considers the “historical, cultural, social, and political dynamics” that have accumulated around them over centuries.
Even their names tell stories that are difficult to contain within contemporary national boundaries. Nahawand takes its name from the Kurdish city; ‘Ajam means “non-Arab”; Bayati is associated with the Bayat tribe in Iraq; Sika derives from Persian; Hijaz takes its name from the historical region of the Arabian Peninsula; and Kurd from the Kurdish people.
Together, they point toward cultural forms produced through centuries of movement across languages, ethnicities, religions, and geographies.
For Abou El Fetouh, this history provides an entry point into a region once again undergoing profound transformation. Questions of ethnicity and identity, art and authority, and relationships to land sit at the heart of the project. The maqāms have survived political upheaval, persecution, war, and the collapse of empires; their histories therefore become a way of thinking through a contemporary moment similarly defined by rupture.
“The Grounding Point” (2025) by Sonia Kallel — a sculpture of woven wool, wires, and metal support. On exhibit as part of Suni’a Bisihrika at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon. August 2026. Photo by Youssef Itani of Studio Tajareb.
Beyond the border
It would be easy to read this framework as a rejection of the borders and nation-states that eventually divided the geographies through which these cultural forms travelled. Abou El Fetouh’s proposition is more complicated.
“The exhibition questions the understanding of nationhood,” he says, examining both the nation-state and other forms of nationalism while placing people’s relationship to land at the center of its narratives. Rather than simply rejecting existing borders, the project interrogates the histories through which identities have been constructed while acknowledging forms of cultural and artistic diversity that precede—and exceed—national, religious, and linguistic categories.
That distinction is important to understanding Suni‘a Bisihrika. The maqām is less the exhibition’s subject than its prism.
Abou El Fetouh points, for example, to the contested history of the term itself. What had previously been referred to as “oriental maqāms” was renamed at the 1932 Cairo Congress, when the classification of eight principal Arabic maqāms emerged. In the exhibition, that history becomes one route into larger questions about who names culture, who organizes it into categories, and how histories are subsequently inherited.
“The history of music is a key, or a prism, for looking at these histories and stories,” he says. The result is what he describes as “a composition of stories from across the Arab World in this moment of rupture.”
“I Am Sick, but I Am Alive/ Hastayim Yasiyorum [Ribs]” (2016) by Haig Aivazian— dark and light mahogany, ebony, and kelebek ornamentations. On exhibit as part of Suni’a Bisihrika at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon. August 2026. Photo by Youssef Itani of Studio Tajareb.
What happens when an artwork travels?
The exhibition brings together contemporary commissions with historical works selected in conversation with the Saradar Collection and Dalloul Art Foundation. Works dating from the early twentieth century through the 1980s sit alongside contemporary practices, creating connections—and sometimes frictions—between different moments in the region’s artistic history.
Movement is consequently embedded not only in the exhibition’s subject matter but in its structure. The project itself travels; new commissions enter with each chapter, while existing works encounter new spaces, audiences, and neighboring artworks.
For participating artist Alla Abdunabi, whose practice already considers the migration of objects, images, and ideas, this movement becomes part of the artwork’s life.
She is interested in how a work “might resonate differently in each location and under each curatorial framework,” and in how proximity to different artworks can alter the way an object is understood. Drawing on theories of image migration and historical examples of objects circulating between cultures, Abdunabi sees the travelling exhibition as an extension of the very questions her practice investigates: the artwork itself is allowed to migrate.
Abdunabi’s work asks viewers to think about how images, icons, and material forms enter public consciousness and gradually acquire authority: how an object might tell an inaccurate story about a place, or how an image repeated often enough can eventually become accepted as truth. “Ultimately,” she says, “I want the work to prompt questions about why we trust representations so readily.”
“I endured for you”(2025) by Alla Abdunabi —large-scale salt sculpture. On exhibit as part of Suni’a Bisihrika at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon. August 2026. Photo by Youssef Itani of Studio Tajareb.
For Syrian artist Bachar Fayoud, bringing his work into a travelling exhibition presents a different kind of opportunity. Showing part of his visual project through a new format, within a larger constellation of works and before audiences far broader than those of a conventional exhibition, places the work in unfamiliar contexts and opens it up to reassessment.
“Presenting the work in such diverse environments will put it to a real test, where the interested viewer becomes the judge,” Fayoud says. He hopes that the responses generated along the way might lead him to reconsider how the project is presented, or “even the possibility of changing it entirely,” while carrying what he learns from those encounters into future work.
The questions he hopes the work will generate are similarly rooted in what happens when an image of one place enters another: whether a place retains its specificity or begins to resemble the different environments in which its images are shown; whether the social diversity captured in his photographs is genuinely particular; and whether the threat facing what remains of nature in his project—including its “last mulberry tree”—is also being experienced elsewhere.
That mulberry tree also became an unexpected record of the political transformations unfolding around Damascus as Fayoud photographed the project over several years.
“At first, the visible effects of these changes on that particular place were minimal,” he explains. “But as the years passed, exhaustion began to seep into the frames and into the people within them, until eventually the tree itself was cut down because of the fuel shortage and the need for its wood for heating.”
For Fayoud, this gradually transformed the photographs into something beyond the individual moments they captured. Each group of images came to represent a distinct stage of the changes unfolding around him, giving the project a documentary dimension alongside its artistic one.
“Years later, I realized that the story of that tree was one of the stories of the country,” he says, “and I found that others saw it as a story worth exhibiting.”
An exhibition that does not end at the artwork
In Beirut, Suni‘a Bisihrika extends beyond the conventional exhibition space through a twelve-week public programme of conversations, listening sessions, workshops, performances, and other encounters.
At its center is Molo Café and Bar, installed inside Beirut Art Center for the duration of the exhibition. Conceived around the eight maqāms, it functions as a café, listening space, meeting point, and venue for musical events. Rather than treating gathering as something that happens before or after viewing art, Molo incorporates it into the exhibition itself.
This is central to how Beirut Art Center understands the project—and, increasingly, its own institutional role.
“The conversations are not secondary to the artworks; they are part of how the work continues to live,” Beirut Art Center explains. The institution describes its public not as standing outside the exhibition, receiving something already complete, but as participating in its circulation. Talks, gatherings, performances, and encounters allow an artwork to move beyond the object and enter a broader exchange. Guided tours, workshops, conferences, and listening sessions therefore become spaces for interpretation and debate rather than supplementary programming.
That approach becomes particularly significant in a region where physical and political fragmentation continually threatens cultural exchange.
For Beirut Art Center, the role of an institution in such a context is not simply to preserve existing conversations, but “to keep creating the conditions for [them] to happen.” Its ambition is to act as a cultural transmitter across geographies and generations, using exhibitions, archives, radio, publishing, learning, and gathering to maintain relationships that might otherwise disappear once a particular event or project ends.
Edward Bouri, curatorial assistant at Beirut Art Center, situates the exhibition within Beirut specifically. After particularly difficult years for Lebanon’s cultural scene, he argues, hosting a travelling regional exhibition both keeps Beirut connected to regional cultural production and enables exchanges among artists, curators, and audiences that political conditions can make increasingly difficult.
Age of Empires(2025) by Bady Dalloul—printed images on rice paper from an original work on ink, crayon, and collage on boards. On exhibit as part of Suni’a Bisihrika at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon. August 2026. Photo by Youssef Itani of Studio Tajareb.
Made with whose magic?
Perhaps this is where Suni‘a Bisihrika becomes most interesting. An exhibition that begins with eight musical modes ultimately asks how culture survives movement between territories, political systems, generations, institutions, and people.
The works do not necessarily provide a coherent answer, nor are they really intended to.
For Abdunabi, art can function as evidence of the conditions through which artists are living, documenting the present even when documentation is not its explicit purpose. For Fayoud, photographs made over years eventually revealed a history larger than the individual scenes they captured. And for Abou El Fetouh, art offers the possibility of rereading histories precisely at a moment when the region demands that they be read again.
At Beirut Art Center, these ideas are allowed to sit beside one another rather than resolve into a single narrative. Historical works encounter new commissions; music becomes a way into politics without the exhibition becoming about music; a café becomes part of the curatorial space; and an exhibition originating in Tunis changes as it passes through Beirut before moving elsewhere.
House of Dreams(2026) by Alaa Sheikh Hassan— 15-minute video. On exhibit as part of Suni’a Bisihrika at the Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon. August 2026. Photo by Youssef Itani of Studio Tajareb.
BAC hopes visitors will similarly resist experiencing these elements separately. Looking, listening, learning, gathering, and participating are intended to inform one another, allowing audiences to move through different forms of knowledge rather than simply consume individual works.
In that sense, Suni‘a Bisihrika is less interested in arriving at a definitive account of the region than in asking what becomes visible when its histories are placed back into conversation with one another.
The maqāms survived precisely because they travelled—absorbing the traces of different peoples, places, languages, and histories along the way. In Beirut, they become a reminder that culture has rarely obeyed the boundaries subsequently drawn around it. And perhaps, amid another period of fragmentation, their endurance offers a way to think not only about what has been inherited, but what might still be made from it.
You can go experience the exhibit at Beirut Art Center, on display till October 25, 2026.
Al Rawiya Team
- Al Rawiya Team
- Al Rawiya Team
- Al Rawiya Team
- Al Rawiya Team
- Al Rawiya Team
- Al Rawiya Team
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