MOHAMAD KANAAN — THE JOY OF BECOMING

فَصْلٌ فِي الصَّيْرُورَةِ وَالتَّكَوُّنِ وَالْعَجَبِ فِي صُنْعِ الْغَرِيبِ وَتَحَوُّلَاتِهِ

What if becoming were not about arriving at a final form, but about finding joy in the possibility of becoming something else?

Rooted in a years-long engagement with Zakariyya al-Qazwīnī’s thirteenth-century cosmography, ʿAjāʾib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʾib al-mawjūdāt, the exhibition unfolds as a world in continuous formation, where boundaries between the strange and the wondrous, the human and the creature, the body and its surroundings begin to dissolve.

Bringing together drawing, sculpture, architecture, textiles, moving image, sound and performance, Kanaan creates an evolving constellation of bodies, creatures and structures that split, merge, multiply and transform. Through years of research, making and collaboration with children, the exhibition embraces play, imagination and collective creation, extending beyond the finished artwork into a world that continues to change.

Shaped by experiences of return, uncertainty and rupture, The Joy of Becoming proposes joy not as the absence of fear or grief, but as something that can emerge from within them, through imagination, desire and the courage to make other worlds possible.

An invitation to inhabit the strange, embrace the unfinished, and discover the joy of becoming.

Opening on November 12
Beirut Art Center, Beirut

A programme of performances, workshops and collective encounters will unfold throughout the exhibition.