OXFORD, ENGLAND.-Modern Art Oxford presents the UK’s most comprehensive exhibition of work by artists emerging from Beirut today. Since the end of the civil war in 1990, Beirut has become a fertile ground for radical and innovative art making and critical thought. Out of Beirut introduces to the UK new and recent work by artists who have been at the forefront of this activity.

Film maker Lamia Joreige maps a landscape of memory as she walks the former Green Line dividing east and west Beirut to interview residents about those who went missing during the civil war. Walid Sadek’s poetic text paintings question the possibility of creating an art of the future within a society caught in an imagined and idealised past while Walid Raad’s dramatic photomontage of drawings, notes and recorded images attempts to capture Beirut as a city that constantly reminds residents of its own fragility.

A number of the works in the exhibition offer insight into the ways in which artists respond to political events as they are happening around them. Distracted Bullets, a video installation by artists and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, maps the city according to public displays of celebration on different religious and civic holidays. Ziad Abillama’s video captures the hopes of Beirut’s residents gathering in Martyr’s Square after the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The exhibition also includes new work made for the exhibition by Jalal Toufic, Akram Zaatari and the anonymous artists’ collective Heartland, who are creating a floor covering based on a rescaled map of Lebanon for the Gallery’s non-art spaces.

The cross-disciplinary nature of much artistic practice in Beirut is also highlighted in the exhibition which includes renowned Beirut architect Bernard Khoury’s film on his underground night-club BO18, and Tony Chakar’s A Window To The World, 2005, in which the intimate observations of personal experience assume the conventions of architectural display.