Art against erasure: A Palestinian sculptor and a Lebanese painter on war, exile and memory

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Art against erasure: A Palestinian sculptor and a Lebanese painter on war, exile and memory Submitted by Victoria Brittain on Fri, 11/13/2026 - 12:11 Abdul Rahman Katanani and…

The large studios of Abdul Rahman Katanani and Ayman Baalbaki are filled with canvases and installations about memory and destruction, drawn from the Israeli wars that shaped both artists’ youth.

These magical spaces, one in an anonymous building in busy central Beirut, and the other far from the city in a village high in the hills, speak for Lebanon and Palestine.

Katanani’s materials are barbed wire, corrugated metal sheets, olive branches, petroleum barrels and discarded clothes from his birthplace, the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp.

“I’ve always wanted to use the materials of the camp. These materials are our shadows. No... they’re us,” he told Middle East Eye.

The harsh materials yield startling lyrical shapes, such as a nine-metre wave in barbed wire, a child playing, a lotus flower and a bright early collage of clothes, including the unexpectedly intimate detail of underwear.

Once, he built a replica of the Palestinian camp of his childhood, shown inside an art gallery.

Baalbaki’s very large mixed-media paintings are distinctive. They feature multiple thick layers of paint, often acrylic, in both intense and subtle colours. Many form part of a mesmerising series.

One such series, Destruction and Loss, depicts the ruin of Beirut’s iconic buildings, like his 2015-16 iconic painting of the Barakat Building on the corner of Damascus Road on the Green Line of the 15-year-long civil war.

A hundred years ago, the magnificent house with its sandstone arches and halls in Ottoman style was a centre of Beirut’s grandeur.

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