The Sursock

There hasn't been a census conducted here in decades. One reason may be that the results would upset the delicate power-sharing agreement that ended the 1975-90 civil war. It's reasonable to say Beirut's population is over 1 million, probably closer to 2. Yet it remains a small town, and if you live here, any number of people will be familiar with your personal business. Current events are spread by word of mouth.

And so it was that I learned from a Scottish NGO worker of the Assadour exhibit at the Sursock, a contemporary art museum on the north slope of Mount Achrafieh where for nearly 60 years, new works by Lebanese painters and sculptors have been showcased.

Among them ...

Elie Kanan, above.

And Samia Osserian Jumblatt.

The spring 2016 "Landscape in Motion" exhibit turns our gaze to Assadour (one name will suffice, I guess), who was born in Beirut in 1943. His human figures' limbs lay askew, as if they were dolls tossed on the floor (mass graves interest him), or their arms held barred across the torso, to shield our inner lights from outside torments.

We have little control of our lot, Assadour seems to say, being subjects, not agents of our lives, melded by necessity with machines, trapped in boxes of circumstance. His work might resonate with the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Beirut's southern suburbs — if they weren't so busy scraping out an existence.

In the comfortable city center we sip Muscat at the Sursock and muse upon such things. Because whatever other place Lebanon holds in the Arab world, it is, singularly, not a scold.