Testimonies of Fire

Overview

A journey through fire: its violence, its memory, and its transformation into art.

Testimonies of Fire is the Dalloul Artist Collective’s first group exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation. Curated by Dr. Basel Dalloul, the show brings together more than twenty artists whose works confront massacres, wars, and displacements, transforming devastation into testimony and masterpieces.

At its center stands the first public presentation of Dia Azzawi’s Sabra and Shatila Massacre tapestry, 2018. Originally conceived in 1982-83 as a vast polyptych in response to the Beirut massacre, the work has long been recognized as a landmark of modern Arab art, often called the “Guernica of the Arabs.” Commissioned by DAF and woven in Madrid’s Real Fábrica de Tapices over four years by more than thirty artisans, the tapestry translates fragile paper into enduring fiber, ensuring that Azzawi’s outcry against atrocity will travel across generations and geographies.

Around this monumental centerpiece, the exhibition unfolds across four registers: the shock of atrocity, the ruins left behind, the weapons and hostile materials reimagined as monuments, and the oracles of endurance that carry fire’s afterlife into vision. Fire here is not only destructive; it is also transformative, forging steel, weaving thread, and igniting memory.

The exhibition gathers works by Youssef Abdelke, Dia Azzawi, Ayman Baalbaki, Said Baalbaki, Serwan Baran, Jean Boghossian, Tagreed Darghouth, Chawky Frenn, Mahmoud Hammad, Inaya Hodeib, Mohammed Kacimi, Salim Al Kadi, Mamdouh Kashlan, Abdul Rahman Katanani, Sliman Anis Mansour, Nazir Nabaa, Mahmoud Obaidi, Faisel Laibi Sahi, Marwan Sahmarani, Asim Abu Shakra, Hady Sy, Alfred Tarazi, and Katya Traboulsi. Each work stands as a material witness, etched, burned, woven, or forged in response to violence and survival.

Presented in DAC’s Stone Garden headquarters in Beirut, Testimonies of Fire transforms the Artspace into a site of remembrance and responsibility. These works do not illustrate history; they bear witness to it. They call us to recognize that the flames are not only of the past but continue to shape the present and future.

This first group exhibition at DAC signals our commitment to artist-led narratives, intergenerational dialogue, and regionally anchored cultural work. It is both commemoration and call to act. It is an insistence that the testimonies carried in these works endure, resisting silence and erasure.