DESIGN “IN” CONFLICT

Conflict is not an event. It is a condition — fluid, systemic, inescapable. It structures perception, governs movement, and reshapes the spaces we inhabit.

In Lebanon, conflict is not a rupture in an otherwise stable terrain but a mode of existence, a lens through which the built environment, material landscapes, and lived realities are continuously reconfigured. Architecture, design, and art are not external to these forces. They are entangled within them, absorbed into their mechanisms, and often mobilized as instruments of power. This exhibition confronts that entanglement, resisting the comforting narratives of post-conflict reconstruction or speculative futures. Instead, it engages with conflict as a system to be navigated, interrogated, and revealed. The works gathered here do not observe from a distance. They navigate the architectures, material traces, and territorial inscriptions that conflict leaves behind. They demand a reassessment of creative practice, not as a stable discipline offering resolution, but as a field in constant negotiation with instability. Here, instability is not an interruption but the medium through which these practices operate. Conflict does not simply destroy; it reorganizes. It dictates what is seen, erased, controlled, or contested. Yet, these processes often go unexamined, obscured by the spectacle of violence or the rhetoric of reconstruction. This exhibition insists on a different framework, one that does not situate conflict as an interruption but as an active and ongoing condition. It seeks to expose, reveal, and engage with its spatial and perceptual logistics as they unfold. This is not an exhibition about war. It is an exhibition about how conflict configures space, artefacts, form, and inhabitation in Lebanon—not as an isolated history but as an ongoing negotiation. These works do not seek to define what comes after conflict. They insist on engaging with what emerges through it.