Huge Likeness

Ala Younis presents Huge Likeness, a solo show at the Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum on Sidani Street in Hamra, Beirut, organised by AUB Art Galleries and Collections. It runs from 25 September 2026 to 10 January 2027. The show includes Plan for Greater Baghdad (2015), an installation of prints, drawings, archival and found materials and a model, together with newer works.

Younis usually sets out from a single fragment: a building, an image, an anecdote or a publication. From there she follows stories of modernity, politics and cultural imagination across the Arab region, asking how buildings, printed matter and personal accounts shape what is remembered. Several of the works came out of her time with the libraries and archives of the American University of Beirut, some directly and some at a tangent. Architecture is both the subject of the exhibition and the way it works.

Plan for Greater Baghdad began with a set of slides that the architect Rifat Chadirji took in 1982 of a gymnasium in Baghdad. Le Corbusier designed the building, which was named after Saddam Hussein. Its plans went through many versions over twenty-five years before it opened in 1980. The venue notes that Chadirji's photographic collection was once held in Beirut. Using drawings, archival material and three-dimensional figures of the men in the story, the work looks at monuments, architects and governments. It was first shown in All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and is held by the Barjeel Art Foundation.

The newer works return to the training Younis received as an architect at the University of Jordan, from which she graduated in 1997. Here she works with drawing tools, prototypes and the move from hand to machine as her raw material. The show is a collaboration with the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Chair for Arabic and Islamic Studies at the AUB Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It is supported by the Philippe Jabre Exhibition Fund and SNA. It opened with a reception on 25 September 2026 from 6pm to 8pm and is open Monday to Friday, 12pm to 6pm, except on official and AUB holidays.