Memory Keepers

Memory Keepers is a solo exhibition of paintings by Yasmina Nysten in The Upper Gallery at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Justinian Street, Clemenceau, Beirut, from 28 August to 30 September 2026.

The exhibition comprises eleven oil paintings on canvas, nine dated 2025 and two dated 2026: Cézanne, Mayyar, Minor Keys, The Countryside, Street Lights, Sister Bird, Second Pool, Karélia, Cleio, Cricket and Odessa. They range from 28 by 35.5 cm to 100 by 76 cm (Street Lights). The exhibition text describes work that "tends towards the face, portraits that combine large swathes of muted colour with quick swatches of unapologetic brightness", with objects "so casually yet carefully placed" that they appear to carry a relation to the face beside them. Pattern, the text continues, "honours the way the world can catch on a moment."

Yasmina Alexandra Nysten is a Finnish-Lebanese artist based in Oregon. Born in Helsinki and raised in Beirut, she holds a BFA from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) and an MFA in Digital Arts from Pratt Institute in New York. Her early practice focused on the body through large-format paintings and works on paper, and expanded during her years in New York to urban environments, social narratives and the dynamics of visibility and absence. Working on the Pacific coast in Oregon, she has turned to portraiture as a space to examine identity beyond literal likeness, with figures described as "thresholds where interior states, ancestral memory, and environments overlap."

The Upper Gallery, on the ground floor of Saleh Barakat Gallery, hosts what the gallery calls "an ongoing series of rotating displays and small-scale exhibitions", intended to spotlight projects that are experimental or smaller in scale, as well as overlooked practices of modern and contemporary art.