Mare Nostrum

The Sursock Museum in Beirut will present Mare Nostrum, a solo exhibition by Lily Abichahine, from 6 November 2026 to 21 February 2027. Yasmine Helou is the curator. It will be shown in the Twin Galleries on the museum's ground floor and will open on Friday 6 November at 6pm. Abichahine is a lawyer, researcher and artist whose work takes the form of lecture-performances, performances, installations and videos. The exhibition shares its title with her ongoing project on the Mediterranean, begun in 2021, which looks at the sea through law and myth.

The project grew from a line in one of the artist's notes, where she records a fisherman saying that "the Mediterranean Sea travels". She treats the remark as an organising idea. Water passes between countries without passports, and it links the cities where she has lived and worked: Marseille, İzmir, Palermo and Beirut. If the same water moves around the whole basin, the museum's text asks, what separates one stretch of sea from another?

Abichahine, who trained as a lawyer, frames the question in legal terms. "From a legal point of view, land has always had a hierarchy over water," she says, and she questions that order. She asks what would follow if the Mediterranean were treated as one body, "united and whole", rather than divided by the borders drawn on land. Myth is her other tool. She sees it as a law and moral code that ruled before formal legal systems. Through it she traces how power works in history, poetry and the body.

Earlier chapters of Mare Nostrum were staged as performances. In Our Sea I: Choreography for a Woman and a Stone (Palermo, 2021), Sisyphus becomes a woman who runs in a circle for about forty minutes, roped to a stone. Our Sea II: Secrets of the Infinite Sea (Theater Bremen, 2022) recasts the myth of Prometheus, with the artist reading animal livers as a modern haruspex. That piece later travelled to Athens, Utrecht, Beirut and Dublin. The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm, and entry is free.