Beirut and the Golden Sixties (LYON Manifesto of Fragility)

The 16th Lyon Biennale: manifesto of fragility positions fragility at the heart of a generative form of resistance that is emboldened by the past, responsive to the present and primed for the future. Conceived as a collective statement, authored through word, image, sound and movement, it calls on a community of resilient voices to draft a manifesto for a world that is blamelessly fragile. The Biennale is structured around three distinct yet inter-connected layers, where fragility and resistance are explored through the lens of the individual, the city, and the world respectively.

Beirut and the Golden Sixties revisits a turbulent chapter in the development of modernism in Beirut beginning with the 1958 Lebanon crisis and ending with the 1975 outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. Through 230 works by 34 artists and more than 300 archival documents, the exhibition examines this romanticized era of global influence in Beirut to highlight how collisions between art, culture and polarised political ideologies turned the Beirut art scene into a microcosm for larger trans-regional tensions. As a city that is arguably in and of itself a manifesto of fragility, Beirut continues to evoke both vulnerability and determination – or at least traces of it – and conjure forms of resistance, called forth by the urgency of the moment and the desire to be remembered.