Tanya Traboulsi

Beirut, Recurring Dream inhabits a city that exists between reality and imagination—lived, remembered, and continually restaged in the mind. Beirut emerges not as fixed geography but as a shifting scenery: fractured by war, absence, and exile, yet still capable of seducing and unsettling.

“I left in 1983 during the civil war, carrying fragments: checkpoints, the sea along the corniche, orange blossom in the air. Returning decades later, the city felt both familiar and estranged, layered with histories I had not lived, yet somehow carried.”

The work navigates the tension between past and present, memory and reality. Here, Beirut is not a documentary fact but a stage where imagination fills the gaps in history. Abandoned interiors, seascapes, fleeting encounters, and family archives intertwine, allowing reality and fiction to collapse into one another.

Rather than illustrating, the images evoke sensation: the weight of history in an empty room, intimacy across absence. In a time when Beirut is reduced to crisis, the project insists on complexity, asking how belonging is shaped when home is both present and absent.