Ordinary Things

Galerie Tanit in Beirut is presenting Ordinary Things, a solo exhibition by Lebanese artist Zena Assi, who is based in London, on view from 10 September to 17 October 2026 at the gallery's ground floor space in the East Village building on Armenia Street, Mar Mikhael.

Migration, and what happens to memory when it is carried from one place to another, has long run through Assi's work. Here she approaches that condition through everyday objects. In her essay for the exhibition, writer Nayla Tamraz links these things to the transitional objects described by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, which create an intermediate space between inner life and outer reality. A teapot, a chair and a lamp sit beside soldiers, fighter jets and drones, all of them carrying traces of history, war and displacement.

Assi tells this story in a register of the marvellous. A whale floats above a city, a camel walks across rooftops, and wolves, fish, birds and insects mingle with a Phoenician figure, a little girl, a king and a cast of hybrid characters. In one work, fighter planes attack a bouquet of flowers. Scale shifts constantly, so that the familiar becomes strange and the extraordinary starts to feel at home.

The show moves across painting, sculpture and handbuilt ceramics. Bottles painted with cityscapes, like antique vases, recall messages thrown into the sea, while columns read as archaeological fragments. Tamraz notes that the journey through space is also a journey through time, ancient civilisations and art history, with echoes of Japanese printmaking, Monet, Magritte and Pop Art.

Ordinary Things continues Assi's long relationship with Galerie Tanit, following Ode to a Minefield (2022), Study of a Cloud (2023) and Invitation to a Banquet (2024). For audiences in Beirut, a city that knows displacement intimately, her quietly unsettling domestic worlds land with particular weight.