Ziad Abillama

Ziad Abillama is a contemporary thinker, author, diarist, visual artist, designer and speaker from Lebanon, born in Beirut in 1969. His work questions the Lebanese civil war and interrogates violence without totalising, blaming, or politicking. He conceptualizes a global reflection on personal and collective experiences that stems from Lebanon's social and political landscape.

In 1987, he left the Lebanese war to study in the USA, at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Amherst College. During his American stay, the first Gulf War started in 1991. Before the much-televised conflict and the interactions around it, 22-year old Abillama started developing his sociopolitical awareness, investigating topics of Arabism, East and West, identity, exoticism, violence, and the other. He completed his studies and returned to Lebanon in 1992, where he now lives and works on his prolific literary production of catalogues, manuscripts and essays – some in the form of a journal.

Abillama is widely recognized for revitalizing Beirut's art scene after the Lebanese civil war, and for presenting its first art installation in 1992. His work in sculpture, installation art, product design, and video art is part of personal collections and permanent exhibitions, and is regularly showcased in solo and group presentations, internationally and in Lebanon (the 54th Venice Biennale, the MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts, the Sursock Museum, , Art Dubai, Modern Art Oxford, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Villa Empain).

Background and education Ziad Abillama is a descendant of local princes, and an unwitted member of a historically prominent Lebanese Christian Maronite francophone right-wing family. Based on this background, some art critics have interpreted his artistic trajectory as a process of questioning and deconstructing inherited social and cultural privilege, describing his work as "a continuous exercise in 'unlearning' privilege."

As a kid growing up in Lebanon in the 1970's, Abillama was a three-time judo champion and had exhibited a childhood predilection for drawing. He agreed with his parents that he'd pursue a proper job that utilized his drawing skills and do artwork as a hobby to fill idle time.

In 2005, he completed and defended his graduation thesis, Faith and Fanaticism (La foi et le fanatisme) in Art & Video at the Académie Libanaise Des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in Beirut. Here, Abillama explored video as a tool to rationally reconsider the Lebanese past.

Sociopolitical influence The Lebanese War of 1975 It was during his time spent in the US that Abillama was directly confronted with the political implications of the Lebanese Civil War. His personal search for independence, risking parental disapproval and financial abandonment to pursue his childhood aspirations coincided with his developing political awareness. These experiences would guide Abillama's future projects, exploring the legacy of Lebanese cosmopolitanism and its intersection with religion, faith, and nationalism.

He writes in his book entitled 1992: "[...] What one almost never encounters elsewhere, and what I myself have only known in the Levantine city where I was born, is the permanent and intimate coexistence between Christian or Jewish populations steeped in Arab civilization, and Muslim populations resolutely oriented toward the West, its culture, its way of life, its values. [...] The disintegration of the Levant's plural societies has caused an irreparable moral deterioration, one that now affects all human societies and unleashes upon our world previously unimaginable forms of barbarism."

On this topic, he has also made a series of statements: The encounter between East and West is, like any sexual relationship, impossible. The dazzling meeting of East and West religiously conceals the fantasy of the prostitute and her pimp. The unveiling of the East exposes the constitutive void within Western consciousness. This encounter between East and West is a simulated form of pleasure and, ultimately, a metaphysical-political fraud.

Beirut and Lebanon Lebanon's civil war is not the only Lebanese influence on Ziad Abillama's work. The reconstruction of Beirut, the Syrian occupation, the 2005 assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, the Cedar Revolution, the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war, the continuing series of assassinations, the 17 October Revolution in 2019, and the August 4, 2020, double explosion in the Beirut Port all shaped his body of work.

For example, in the Cedar Revolution, the chain of mass demonstrations triggered by the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Abillama directed confrontational questions about the future of Lebanon toward protesters and recorded their responses in a low-quality video. This video then became part of a group exhibition at Modern Art Oxford.

Similarly, the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war inspired "Frustrating Chairs", sculptures that embody falsehood and uselessness at a time when people were fixated on the triumph of their own views. The 2019 civil protests of the 17 October Revolution inspired a series of published texts, and a video interrogated the framing of the double explosion that occurred in the Beirut Port on August 4, 2020.

Artistic reception Ziad Abillama's work has often been considered revolutionary and transgressive.

First post-war artistic public intervention Widely cited by critics as the first postwar artistic public intervention in Lebanon, Ziad Abillama's 1992 beach installation was staged on a rubbish-cleared section of San Balech beach, north of Beirut, and then left to decay. Surrounded by barbed wire and lit with a generator, the work displayed metal scraps, discarded missiles, and missile-derived sculptures, variously arranged in a shopping trolley, a glass case, or as hybrid cage-like chairs.

Critics argue that, in transforming instruments of destruction into objects of contemplation, the work turned the experience of violence into material for historical and aesthetic reflection, echoing the importance of aesthetics in terms of transitional justice.

The Beirut School

Ziad Abillama is among the pioneering figures of Lebanon's post-civil war era, often linked to the loosely defined "Beirut School," which emerged in the 1990s including Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, Lamia Joreige, Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad, Marwan Rechmaoui, Walid Sadek, Jayce Salloum, Lina Saneh, Jalal Toufic and Akram Zaatari. This generation is known for reshaping contemporary Lebanese art by examining modern history, imagery, and political systems, particularly through film, documentary, and narrative forms. As art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie notes, they helped initiate a long-term, wide-ranging conversation on how history is constructed, mediated, and often distorted by images and narratives, and how art can challenge it. His work transforms violence into material for reflection, and engages with themes of repression, latency, disaster, and withdrawal. Alongside others, he redefined what it means to witness in art after nearly two decades of unfinished conflict and within a neoliberal environment where state and private interests converged.

Curators and critics For curators and critics outside Lebanon, Beirut entered the contemporary art world around 2002, when the city began to experience a series of international projects invested in an art scene that purportedly operated in a liminal zone, the product of a war-torn history that nonetheless promised an alternative to institutional norms. In the aftermath of nearly two decades of violence, foreign curators lauded a set of critical practices (including those of Ziad Abillama and Walid Sadek) that showcased the possibilities of an activist art. The radicality of the art produced by this first generation of postwar artists can only be understood by tracing a longer history of art in Lebanon than the one that emerges from the rubble left by the civil war.

Notable artistic works In the 1990s, Ziad Abillama's projects critically engaged with the civil war's legacy, seeking to redefine art's social function postwar. His early work focused on the civil war's specific history and broader representational concerns, marking a critical turn in Lebanese art. Rester un Arabe pour l'émancipation des Juifs: témoignage et manipulation; Jerusalem; 1996 Système Full Fill; Beirut; 1996 Délire Esthétique (Aesthetic Delirium); Épreuve d'artiste Gallery, Beirut; 2004 Nature and Drugs; FairPlay Video Festival, Berlin; 2006 Out of Beirut; Modern Art Oxford, London; 2006 Les chaises frustrantes; Art Lounge, Beirut; 2007 La défaite de l'exotisme; Faqra Club; 2008 Images: fixe, mobile, animée; Institut français du Liban, Beirut; 2009 The Future of a Promise; Magazzini del Sale, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice; 2011 Art Dubai; Dubai; 2011 Museum as Hub: Beirut Art Center: Due to unforeseen events...; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; 2011 Museum as Hub: Beirut Art Center: Due to unforeseen events...; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; 2011 Art is the Answer; Villa Empain, Brussels; 2012 Post-Fascism, Post-Imperialism, Post Ziad; Atelier Ziad Abillama, Dbayeh; 2013 Art is the Answer; Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut; 2013 Beirut Art Fair; Beirut; 2014 Art Dubai; Dubai; 2016 Beirut Art Fair; Beirut; 2017 Croquez Monsieur, chères Mesdames; Imago Mundi Collection, Treviso; 2017 The Twisted Wing of the Airplane King; Agial Art Gallery, Beirut; 2017 Beirut Art Fair; Beirut; 2018 Reality in the Real: Ziad Abillama, FAP; London; 2021 Les érections irréductibles; Agial Art Gallery, Beirut; 2022 Panorama de la sculpture au Liban; MACAM, Lebanon; 2023 Intimate Garden Scene; Sursock Museum; 2023–2024

Literary production Abillama's work is informed by an interest in dichotomies and structures of domination that shape the world, including the East in relation to the West, woman in relation to man, and the self in relation to the other. In addition to his artistic practice, working with great erudition, historical accumulation, reflection, and distance, he is the author of several texts, some published and others forthcoming. 1992 (published on 20 October 2022) Les nouveaux isolationnistes (published on 1 December 2022) N (published on 1 October 2023) Beirut revisitée + Cinq portraits de femmes (published on 3 October 2025) Femmes qui ne mènent nulle part (forthcoming)