"Sites of Life"
Sites of Life takes a posthumanist lens to explore how Arab artists imagine and enact life beyond the human. Posthumanism challenges the idea that humans stand at the centre of existence and invites us to see vitality as shared across people, objects, and the natural world, recognising that all forms of life are interdependent.
As dominant media narratives continue to dehumanise Arab life, reducing it to scenes of destruction and despair, what they overlook is the profound generosity of Arab culture that extends care for the more than human. To live, and to extend life, becomes a form of resistance.
Drawing on works by Palestinian and Lebanese artists, this exhibition traces how life extends into the everyday: into living spaces, soundscapes, landscapes, and threads of embroidery. It suggests that Arab ways of being have long reflected posthuman sensibilities, where the boundary between human and nonhuman dissolves into a more expansive understanding of existence.
Through photography, sound, video, and tatreez, Sites of Life reimagines what it means to live under conditions of erasure. In doing so, it joins a broader posthuman turn in contemporary art— one that seeks to de-centre the human and reconfigure our understanding of life as a shared and entangled process. It stands as a testament to the endurance and imagination of Arab worlds that refuse to be stripped of life, for they have always known that life exceeds the human.
Entry Fee: £5 (At the door)
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Karen Atallah is a Lebanese researcher and independent curator whose work explores the intersections of political violence and everyday life in the Middle East. She holds an MA in Anthropology focused on migration and diaspora studies, and her practice engages posthumanist perspectives that center Arab and diasporic artists who challenge dominant narratives of the region. She is particularly interested in creative storytelling as a means of reimagining everyday life.
Ségolène Ragu (b. 1990) is a French-Lebanese photographer based in Beirut. She works on long-term projects, documenting the memory of places and the impact of crises and war on daily life in Lebanon. She holds a Master’s degree in Communication and has completed a documentary photojournalism workshop in Paris. Her work has been exhibited in Lebanon, France, Belgium and Qatar and she took part in the Samir Kassir Foundation x World Press Photo masterclass in 2025 in Lebanon.
Masa Nazzal is an artist and researcher based in London. Her practice engages with traditional Palestinian cross-stitch, tatreez, drawing thematic and stylistic inspiration from the craft. Through this language of thread, she explores the experience of diaspora, using fragmentation to think about what is broken and what is still emerging.
Aya Chouaib is a Lebanese multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and founder of X Vendetta, a media initiative debunking war + climate propaganda and exploring the intersections of design, memory, and resistance. Working across sound, image, and installation, her practice traces how landscapes bear the weight of war, exile, and return. Through X Vendetta, Aya extends her artistic language into digital activism, designing investigative visual posts and producing documentaries that expose the political ecologies of conflict and climate. Her work bridges the poetic and the political, insisting that art can be both an archive and a weapon of truth.
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