Between us: curating in / on / around crises

This project began with a recurring question—one that surfaced often in conversations with collaborators, artists, friends: What does it mean to curate in the midst of ongoing crises? Not just political crisis, but the slower forms of erosion—the collapse of infrastructure, the exhaustion of time, the fraying of social and institutional trust. In Beirut, these aren’t temporary conditions—they are the baseline. Yet within and around them, people continue to gather, to host, to make meaning.

Between Us was born from this impulse, and from a desire to broaden what we mean when we say curating. Too often, the term arrives shaped by Eurocentric, academic, and institutional expectations: exhibition-making, cultural stewardship, the presentation of objects within sanctioned spaces. But what happens when those spaces are unstable, or absent? When the urgency is not interpretation, but survival, adaptation, repair?

In Beirut, curating has always stretched beyond disciplinary definitions. It is a mode of engagement—a way of holding space, making do, responding in real time. Over the past five years, at TAP, we’ve seen this firsthand. From learning with forests and organizing emergency relief residencies, to hacking empty billboards and building temporary networks of solidarity, our work has never begun with a fixed curatorial framework. Instead, the framework emerges from the context. From being on the ground. From listening, trying, failing, adjusting. From learning by doing.

In May 2025, we invited six people to take part in three informal conversations—each across different disciplines, each rooted in Beirut. A chef and a venue organizer. A trauma surgeon and an anthropologist. An artist and an ophthalmologist. These were not panel discussions or structured interviews. They were invitations to think aloud—about joy, repair, and vision—not as abstract themes, but as living practices.

The first conversation explores joy, not as escapism, but as a deeply embodied response to crisis. Wael Lazkani (Jaï) and Hicham Jaber (Metro Al Madina) speak of hosting and nourishing in conditions of scarcity. The second centers on repair, with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr. Kirsten Scheid tracing connections between physical wounds and social rupture. The third turns to vision, with Akram Zaatari and Dr. Alaa Bou Ghannam considering the possibilities and limitations of vision and perception.

These exchanges are not definitive answers to the question of what curating is or should be. Rather, they offer a methodology of being together—thinking across fields, listening across experiences, and allowing practices to evolve organically. Between Us is a proposition: that curating in crisis is not a top-down application of theory, but an emergent process of relation. It is not about preserving meaning, but co-creating it—on shifting ground, between people, in real time.

Read it here.