Becoming Icon

Becoming Icon is a long-term collection display at the Sursock Museum in Achrafieh, Beirut, installed in the Collection Galleries on Level 2 and continuing on the first floor in the Fouad Debbas Collection Gallery. Curated by Yasmine Chemali, it opened on 17 July 2025 and runs until 20 June 2027. The French title is Devenir icône: réception, histoires et circulations.

The exhibition draws on the museum's own collection, with public and private loans, and asks a direct question: "How does an artwork attain the status of an icon?" In the museum's words, it "examines dynamics of recognition, exclusion, and legitimization in modern and contemporary art." The route is organised around a set of definitions, among them form, symbol, community, unity, absorption, circulation, model, landmark, emblem and diffusion, which appear on the walls and frame each group of works.

The exhibition guide follows several case studies. Youssef Hoyeck's first Martyrs' Memorial of 1930, vandalised in 1948 and now kept on the museum's esplanade, is presented as the first artwork to carry a national narrative in Lebanon. Stelio Scamanga's Icons series is read through light and contemplation, and César Gemayel's paintings of the model Maryam Khairo open a section on the academic nude and the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. The mountain section places Etel Adnan's Mount Tamalpais beside Nadim Asfar's photographs of Mount Hermon and Gilbert Hage's images of Mount Ararat, while the cedar appears through Philippe Mourani, Khalil Zgaib and a tapestry by Simone Baltaxé. The guide's cover image is a 1970 painting by Paul Guiragossian acquired by the museum in 2012.

Alongside the works, the display looks at the places that shaped Beirut's art scene in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Horseshoe café on Hamra Street and Dar el-Fan, founded by Janine Rubeiz in 1967, and at the scholarships that sent artists such as Chafic Abboud and Michel Basbous to study in Paris. "Becoming an icon is not merely a matter of reception, but an active, conflicted, and deeply political process," the curatorial text states.

The exhibition gives a reading of how the museum, open to the public since 1961, has itself taken part in deciding which works become reference points in Lebanese and Arab art. Scenography is by Atelier Meem Noun with Jacques Abou Khaled.