The museums aiming to revive Lebanon’s reputation as athriving arts hubIn recent years, due in part to economic woes, political turbulence and a dearth of state funding in the arts,

Lebanon has struggled to keep up with the growth of the regional scene

India Stoughton

July 20, 2018

Updated: July 19, 2018 06:35 PM

Beit Beirut was designed to be a museum of memory. Courtesy Beit

Beirut Museum

Lebanon has long held the status of being the cultural hub of the

Arab world, known for its dozens of annual arts festivals and

vibrant gallery scene. Yet in recent years, due in part to economic

woes, political turbulence and a dearth of state funding in the

arts, it has struggled to keep up with the growth of the regional

scene, particularly in the UAE, where state-funded museums

affiliated with world-class institutions, such as Louvre Abu Dhabi

and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, are attracting visitors from all over

the world.

Change is in the air, however. The recent opening, re-opening or

refurbishment of several museums in Beirut, coupled with plans

for four art and archaeological museums set to open in the next

five years signals a new phase in Lebanon’s cultural

development.

National Museum of BeirutWith significant excavations spanning the length and breadth of

the country, Lebanon’s archaeological richness is one of its major

tourist attractions. Small museums at sites including Baalbek and

Byblos are complemented by the National Museum of Beirut,

which houses a large collection of priceless artefacts from across

the country, dating from prehistory to the end of the Ottoman

Empire.

In October 2016, the museum reopened its basement, which had

been closed for more than 40 years, since the Lebanese civil war.

Refurbished with a €1.2 million (Dh5.1m) grant from the Italian

government, the basement is now the highlight of the museum,

housing a display of funerary art that includes a human tooth

dating back 250,000 years, unique 7,000-year-old Phoenician

marble sarcophagi and 13th century mummies from the Qadisha

Valley.

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Plans are underway to open an expansion, which will house a

cafe and space for temporary exhibitions and workshops. Like

many projects in Lebanon, the expansion is a result of a fusion

between state and private initiatives. It is spearheaded by a

charity, the Lebanese Heritage Foundation, which is raising funds

for the addition and will oversee its direction once it opens.

Beirut History MuseumThis is another major archaeological museum due to open in the

next five years in Downtown Beirut. It will be housed in a glass

building designed by the Pritzker-prize winning Italian architect

Renzo Piano. Construction was originally set to begin in 2014,

but was delayed after an important archaeological find on the

land earmarked for the museum, which is located in Martyr’s

Square, close to the ancient Phoenician settlement excavated in

the late 1990s.

After three years of excavations, construction finally began this

month. Minister of Culture Ghattas Khoury estimates that it will

take three years, meaning the museum is likely to open in 2022,

barring further delays.

Like the National Museum, it will display artefacts from

archaeological sites across the country, but the role of the new

museum is to tell “the history of Beirut across the centuries”.

Piano’s building will be surrounded by an “archaeological garden”

that includes the excavated Phoenician port area. “It is glass so

that it doesn’t close the view from Martyr’s Square to the Petit

Serail, down to the sea,” says Khoury. Renderings from Piano’s

office show a glass structure rising three stories up and

descending four stories below the earth, with a viewing platform

allowing visitors to gaze out over the excavations, set amid a

paved pedestrian area.

The project is estimated to cost $70 million (Dh257m), excluding

the value of the land. The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic

Development has donated $35m and a further $35m has been

pledged by controversial Lebanese joint-stock company Solidere,

responsible for the renovation of Downtown Beirut after the civil

war.

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Sidon Archaeological MuseumIn addition to this ambitious project, a second archaeological

museum is under construction in Sidon, south of Beirut,

encompassing an urban site that archaeologist Claude Serhal

has been excavating for 20 years. The excavations, which have

uncovered traces of civilisations from the third millennium BC to

the Crusader period, will be part of the display at the new

museum. It will feature a two-storey exhibition space displaying

the most important finds from the excavation, built atop the 1,600-

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square-metre site, through which visitors will be able to walk on

raised platforms.

The intention is to craft a journey through time, starting at the end

of the fourth millennium BC and finishing in the Crusader period.

Videos shot during the dig will reveal where significant finds were

made and how they were excavated. As well as valuable objects,

such as statues and jewellery, the museum will display objects

that provide insight into the daily lives of the city’s ancient

inhabitants, including calcified textiles from the second

millennium BC and wheat and barley from 2,500BC.

The bones of animals found on site, including bears and

hippopotamuses, reveal the hunting practises of people in the

third millennium BC. “I’m trying to give it another dimension. You

want to see what people ate, what they believed in,” Serhal says.

“They get a sense of daily life and the cult and ritual I These

sorts of stories are why I think it’s a completely different kind of

museum, because we have 20 years of excavations there and we

are telling a story.”

Construction was started several years ago but stalled after a

shortfall in funding. An initial donation of $5m from the Kuwait

Fund for Arab Economic Development was recently

supplemented with funding from the Ministry of Culture, which

has allowed construction to resume. “We have now put in $2m

from the ministry budget,” says Khoury. “We’ll put another $2m

next year so maybe we can finish it.”

Beit BeirutIn addition to the growth of the archaeological museum sector,

two new private museum initiatives are set to augment Beirut’s art

infrastructure in the coming years. They will join the Sursock

Museum and Beit Beirut to provide a comprehensive set of art

museums, each with its own mandate and focus.

Opened in September last year after a decade-long wait, Beit

Beirut is located in a beautiful old mansion that was expropriated

by the municipality in 2003 and renovated with more than $18m

of public funds. Like the National Museum, it is situated on the

former Green Line that divided East and West Beirut during the

civil war and was used as a sniper’s nest during the conflict.

Beit Beirut was designed to be a museum of memory, a cultural

centre and urban observatory dedicated to exploring the history

and architecture of the city over the past century. Unfortunately, it

has been marred by a series of controversies and delays.

Temporary exhibitions have seen it open to the public

sporadically since September last year, but it is currently

operating more as an exhibition space than as a museum, with

no director, no public programme and no permanent collection.

Nevertheless, it is one of the city’s most striking and unusual

venues. The silent stories told by the scarred walls – combined

with its state-of-the-art facilities and spacious exhibition spaces

on the second and third floor – mean it has the potential to

become Lebanon’s most important cultural institution.

Sursock MuseumAn example of the kind of leadership that Beit Beirut needs can

be found in the rebirth of the Sursock Museum, which opened in

October 2015, after extensive renovations that took seven years

and cost roughly $15m. Since then, annual footfall has averaged

65,000 visitors, says the museum’s director Zeina Arida, making it

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one of Lebanon’s most visited cultural venues. Housed in an

Ottoman mansion built in 1912 and donated to the city by its

owner in 1952, the museum has a permanent collection of

several hundred works by Lebanese and Arab artists, displayed

on the upper two stories. The past two years have seen the

acquisition of 264 new works, increasing the total collection by 35

percent. A busy programme of temporary exhibitions, tours, talks

and workshops keeps visitors returning regularly.

The museum receives a percentage of the cost of all work

permits issued within Beirut, making it a hybrid between a public

and a private institution. As Lebanon’s only state-funded

museum, it has a crucial role to play in appealing to a wide

audience. “As someone who has been working in the non-profit

sector for 25 years, I’ve always thought a lot about the

importance of complementing each other, rather than competing,”

explains Arida. “What defines a museum today is understanding

the cultural and social environment and being able to reflect on it.

Otherwise you are just walls with artworks inside I what’s also

important is to continuously attract audiences, so you have to be

a very active institution.”

Beirut Museum of Art

The Beirut Museum of Art. Courtesy Beirut Museum of Art

Her words find echo in those of Rita Nammour, president of the

Association for the Promotion and Exhibition of the Arts in

Lebanon (APEAL), a non-profit NGO. Founded in 2008, it has

been working since 2015 to establishing a major new venue

called the Beirut Museum of Art (BMA).

BMA will showcase modern and contemporary art and already

has a pool of over 3000 works that will form the basis of the

permanent collection, most from the private collection of the

Ministry of Culture, which will be placed in their care. It will also

hold temporary exhibitions by local, regional and international

artists.

“Museums today are not only guardians of a collection,” says

Nammour. “Of course, keeping and showing the collection is very

important, but the other part is that art can heal and challenge

and it’s by delivering an extensive series of programmes, inside

and outside the walls, that we are hoping to generate widespread

engagement and interest.”

BMA’s public programme of community outreach has already

begun. Several artists’ residencies in locations across Lebanon

are contributing to a much-needed drive to decentralise the art

scene and link institutions in Beirut with the rest of the country.

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APEAL has also collaborated with the Ministry of Education to

launch art programmes in schools across Lebanon.

Nammour is confident that BMA will fill a niche in the existing art

infrastructure in Lebanon. “It will complement what already exists

in the city,” she says. “We want all communities in Lebanon to

come and feel that it’s a space for them. The vision for the

museum will continue to evolve in tandem with the society in

which it sits, so it will have a style that will constantly be under

review and formation.”

Lebanese architect Hala Warde, who also worked on the Louvre

Abu Dhabi, won a competition to design the building, which will

include an amphitheatre, a multipurpose event space and a

three-storey exhibition space topped with a dramatic 124-metre

tower, set amid a landscaped garden. The tower will be divided

into a dozen 12-metre cubes, housing a library and artists’

residencies and space for temporary exhibitions, workshops and

classes.

The museum will be located on a plot of land donated by Saint

Joseph University, situated between the National Museum and

Beit Beirut. Construction is set to begin at the end of 2018 and is

estimated to cost in the region of $40 million. In the absence of

any delays, the museum will be ready to open by 2022, says

Nammour.

Beirut Arab Art MuseumA second private art museum is set to open in Beirut in 2020, in a

purpose-built facility funded by the Dalloul family to house their

extensive private collection, which includes more than 4,000

modern and contemporary works by Arab, African and Iranian

artists. As well as showcasing the permanent collection, the

Beirut Arab Art Museum will hold temporary exhibitions organised

via exchange programmes in collaboration with international

institutions.

“Education will be at the core of the Dalloul Art Foundation

museum’s programmes,” says Basel Dalloul, the foundation’s

managing director. “We will definitely be engaging our greater

community with workshops, artists’ talks and cultural

programmes. We also plan on reaching a global audience

through the use of technology, which will include robust social

media and VR programmes.”

With four new museums set to open by 2022 – barring delays –

Lebanon’s cultural scene is about to experience a boom that will

help cement its status as a regional arts hub. Despite shortages

of funding and state support, these institutions play to its

strengths and are likely to attract significant local and

international interest.

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