Beirut Art Center is a space dedicated to contemporary art in Beirut open to all. We aim to bring people together to experience art, learn, debate, and experiment. We are a platform for emerging and established artists, local and international.

Since opening in 2009, BAC has facilitated the creation and realization of projects as well as interactions between local and international cultural initiatives in a space that is open and active all year long.

Over the past years Beirut Art Center has been working diligently during a period of increasing political, financial, economic, social, and environmental emergency and compounding crisis to bridge socio-political life, artistic practices and art institutions. Building on this momentum and important work, the current program further grounds BAC’s mission in creating spaces for dis/engagements and collective learning, knowledge sharing, and considered questioning.

In the midst of these straining conditions, BAC continues to conceive its programs around social, structural and material conditions and despite them. Through consistent and sustained initiatives and programming, BAC insists on maintaining and building a new lifelines of exchange, dialogues and solidarity, locally, regionally and internationally by bringing people together to expand our capacity to think and create in our active efforts to disengage from and with the spectacle of the everyday. Further, the program attempts to turn limitations into generative prompts that constantly revisit what art is, who it speaks to and what it can be or allow us to do, sense and imagine.

The center’s evolving program is guided by our senses, by language or rather its inadequacy; and by the relationship to our environment, each other and our possible futures. It consists of exhibitions; learning initiatives conceived for various ages and abilities; cinema, and music, and involve different communities.

HISTORY

2005 - Establishment of Beirut Art Center Association project, initiated by Sandra Dagher and Lamia Joreige

Founding members: Sandra Dagher, Lamia Joreige, Rabih Mroué, Bassam Kawahji and Maria Ousseimi

2009-2014   BAC Co-directors: Lamia Joreige & Sandra Dagher

2014-2019   BAC director: Marie Murraciole

2019-2022   BAC Administrative director: Rana Nasser Eddin

2020-2022  Artistic Co-Directors: Haig Aivazian & Ahmad Ghossein (until 2021)

2023-2024  BAC director: Reem Shadid

2024-           BAC director: Ibrahim Nehme