TRIPOLI, Lebanon: From the street below it’s easy to miss the workers daubing rooftops as part of an ambitious art project in two battle-scarred neighborhoods of Lebanon’s Tripoli.
But the Ashekman street art duo behind the project say that once they’re done, the pistachio-green rooftops they are painting will spell out the word “salam” — Arabic for “peace” — on a scale visible from space.
The project, three years in the making, is the brainchild of 34-year-old twins Mohamed and Omar Kabbani.
They researched and rejected multiple locations in their native Lebanon before settling on Tripoli.
They chose a site spanning the Bab Al-Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen neighborhoods, which have fought successive rounds of armed clashes in recent years.
“We jumped from one location to another and finally we decided to do it here in Tripoli, specifically in Bab Al-Tebbaneh and Jabal Mohsen, an area that has been in conflict,” said Omar Kabbani.
“We’re painting the word ‘salam’ across 85 building rooftops over 1.3 kilometers... to convey that people here are peaceful,” he said.
“And Lebanon in general, we want peace.”
Peace has been elusive in Sunni-majority Bab Al-Tebbaneh and the adjacent Alawite-majority Jabal Mohsen.
Fighters from the two areas have battled each other periodically for decades, and the war in neighboring Syria, pitting a Sunni-dominated uprising against Alawite President Bashar Assad, has further stirred existing enmities.
The clashes have gouged hundreds of bullet holes into building facades, while mortar fire has blasted through walls, rendering some homes uninhabitable.
Fighting between the neighborhoods has eased in the last two years, but photos of those killed in the most recent violence remain plastered across both areas.
Ashekman’s project runs on either side of the infamous Syria Street separating the two neighborhoods. The duo hired workers from across the divide to help them complete the project.
“All of the workers live here in the neighborhood, they lived the conflict, some of them got shot,” Omar Kabbani said.
“Two years ago they were hiding from bullets... now they’re painting their rooftops proudly.”
The brothers are sensitive to the observation that their project does little to address the most obvious scars of fighting or the area’s desperate poverty, often identified as a catalyst of the violence.
They say they chose paint that will seal rooftops against rain and reflect ultra-violet rays, cooling the homes below.
And in order to paint the rooftops, they had to negotiate with residents and often had to clear large amounts of trash and debris.
“It took us around 10 days just to remove all the garbage on the rooftops,” said Kabbani.
“With the garbage came a couple of rats, and we fought with some rats. It wasn’t an easy task,” he said, laughing.
Walid Abu Heit, 29, joined the project as a painter after hearing about it from March, a Lebanese NGO that has worked on reconciliation and rehabilitation in the rival neighborhoods.
He was born in Bab Al-Tebbaneh and worked at a dairy, but lost his job after violence erupted.
“It was very difficult when fighting broke out,” he said.
“Darkness engulfed the neighborhood. People stopped coming here.”
He and other workers lugged heavy tubs of paint up seven floors and began plastering a roof with the fluorescent green, which flecked his hands and boots.
“It’s an amazing project,” he said, smiling and shading his eyes from the blazing sun.
“The word peace, it’s a great word... we haven’t seen it for a long time, now we’re seeing it again.”
Art brings ‘peace’ to battle-scarred Lebanon districts
Art brings ‘peace’ to battle-scarred Lebanon districts
Lina Gazzaz traces growth, memory and resilience at Art Basel Qatar
- The Saudi artist presents ‘Tracing Lines of Growth’ at the fair’s inaugural edition
DUBAI: Saudi artist Lina Gazzaz will present a major solo exhibition via Hafez Gallery at the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, which runs Feb. 3 to 7. “Tracing Lines of Growth” is a body of work that transmutes botanical fragments into meditations on resilience, memory and becoming.
Hafez Gallery, which was founded in Jeddah, frames the show as part of its mission to elevate underrepresented regional practices within global conversations. Gazzaz’s biography reinforces that reach. Based in Jeddah and trained in the United States, she works across sculpture, installation, painting and video, and has exhibited in Saudi Arabia, the US, Lebanon, the UK, Germany, the UAEand Brazil. Her experimental practice bridges organic material and conceptual inquiry to probe ecological kinship, cultural memory and temporal rhythm.
“Tracing Lines of Growth” is a collection rooted in long-term inquiry. “I started to think about it in 2014,” Gazzaz told Arab News, describing a project that has evolved from her initial simple line drawings through research, experimentation and material interrogation.
What began as tracing the lines of Royal Palm crown shafts became an extended engagement with the palm’s physiology, its cultural significance and its symbolic afterlives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she went deeper into that exploration, translating weathered crown shafts into “lyrical instruments of time.”
Each fragment of “Tracing Lines of Growth” is treated as a cache of human and ecological narratives. Gazzaz describes a feeling of working with materials that “have witnessed civilization,”attributing to them a deep collective memory.
Hafez Gallery’s presentation text frames the palm as a cipher — its vascular routes once pulsing with sap transformed into calligraphic marks that summon the bodies of ouds, desert dunes and scripted traces rooted in Qur’anic and biblical lore.
“Today, the palm has evolved into a symbol of the land and its people. Throughout the Arabian Peninsula, it is still one of the few agricultural exports; and plays an integral role in the livelihood of agrarian communities,” said Gazzaz.
The sculptures’ rippling ribs and vaulted folds, stitched with red thread, evoke what the artist hears and sees in the wood. “Each individual line represents a story, and it’s narrating humanity’s story,” she said.
The works’ stitching is described in the gallery’s materials as “meticulous.” It emphasizes linear pathways and punctuates the sculptures with the “suggestion of life’s energy moving through the dormant material.”
“(I used) fine red thread — the color of life and energy — to narrate the longevity of growth, embodying themes of balance, fragility, music, transformation and movement. The collection is about the continuous existence in different forms and interaction; within the concept of time,” Gazzaz explained.
Hand-stitching, in Gazzaz’s practice, highlights her insistence on care and repair, and the human labor that converts cast-off organic forms into carriers of narratives.
Gazzaz describes her practice as a marriage between rigorous research and intuitive making. “I am a search-based artist... Sometimes I cannot stop searching,” she said. “During the search and finding more and more, and diving more and more, the subconscious starts to collaborate with you too, because of your intention. After all the research, I go with the flow. I don’t plan... I go with the flow, and I listen to it.”
The artist is far from done with this particular project. “I am now beginning to explore the piece with glass,” she noted.
Art Basel Qatar’s curatorial theme for its inaugural year is “Becoming.” For Gazzaz, ‘becoming’ is evident in the material and conceptual transformations she stages: discarded palm fragments reconstituted into scores of lived time, stitched lines reactivated as narratives.
“It’s about balance. It’s about fragility. It’s about resilience,” she said.
