An Article by D. M. (849 words, 4 mins read)
A World Hidden Inside the Everyday
Ordinary Things, Zena Assi’s exhibition at Galerie Tanit, Beirut, from September 10 to October 17, slowly leads us back to our own lives. A bottle, a flower, a ladder, a ceramic creature, a piece of embroidery, a fragment of a city. Familiar objects become containers for journeys, memories and people. Looking at them, we kept thinking about the loyalty of things. We move, change homes, cross borders, grow older, while certain objects stay close to us, quietly collecting pieces of our story.
A City We Take With Us
Migration runs through Assi’s practice, and here it feels intimate. Her cities are dense and crowded. Houses pile upon houses, wires cross, mountains rise behind rooftops and the sea waits below. Everything seems compressed, as though an entire city had to fit inside a suitcase.
This is perhaps what happens when someone leaves a place. Geography becomes emotional. A street survives through the memory of a window. A neighbourhood returns through a smell. A skyline settles somewhere inside the body. Assi’s cities are built from architecture and human experience at once.
Her ceramic bottles follow the same idea. Buildings climb their surfaces, alongside faces, flowers and fragments of daily life. These vessels seem filled with places rather than liquids, small portable homelands travelling toward another destination.
Catching a Thousand Stories
One of the strongest works gathers an extraordinary number of stories into a large, suspended composition resembling a dream catcher. From a distance, it appears almost organic. Up close, a whole world emerges.
Faces, buildings, flowers, animals, signs, political references and tiny scenes meet inside an intricate structure. Elements descend from it like roots, necklaces and fragments of recollection. The eye travels continuously, finding one detail after another.
Memory and dreams often works this way. Childhood sits beside yesterday. A distant face suddenly returns. History enters private life. A city slips into bottle. Assi brings these different times together with no chronological order, within a single visual territory, allowing personal stories and collective history to inhabit the same space.
Drawing With Thread
The hand-embroidered piece introduces another rhythm. Embroidery requires patience and physical closeness. Each thread crosses the surface, disappears behind it and emerges somewhere else. In an exhibition shaped by movement and migration, that journey through fabric becomes especially meaningful.
Urban signs, faces, words, buildings and tangled lines fill the embroidered compositions. Threads resemble roads, borders, electrical cables and trajectories. There is humor among these fragments, along with the visual intensity of contemporary cities.
Sewing, traditionally associated with hands and domestic life, becomes a way of mapping an entire world.
Roots in Full View
Elsewhere, a dark forest spreads across the gallery walls. In front of it stand Zena Assi’s brass flowers, tall and fragile looking, with their roots completely exposed.
Those roots immediately attract the eye. They are intricate, raw and strangely beautiful. Within a body of work concerned with migration, they speak directly about attachment to land and the possibility of growing elsewhere. A root can travel while retaining the memory of its soil.
The flowers rise above these complicated structures as if their strength came precisely from everything visible beneath them. Small ladders and figures enter this invented landscape, suggesting journeys between different places and states. Human beings, plants and imaginary creatures seem to belong to the same restless ecosystem.
A Population Takes Flight
Fruit Flies, created in 2025–2026 from hand-built glazed ceramic, transforms another wall into a lively population. Dozens of tiny hybrid beings scatter across the space. Some appear human, others animal, royal, comic or fantastical. Each seems to possess its own temperament.
Together they form a migration. They gather, separate, climb and drift across the architecture. Their movement gives the installation a playful energy, and humour becomes an essential part of Assi’s language. Serious ideas gain lightness through imagination.
Ceramic tiles extend this dialogue with time. Their layered surfaces resemble fragments recovered from an invented archaeological site. Images accumulate, disappear beneath other images and return in pieces. Clay, one of humanity’s oldest materials, becomes the keeper of contemporary stories.
What We Leave Behind
The title Ordinary Things gradually acquires another meaning. Everyday forms absorb history and personal experience.
Perhaps our lives are ultimately preserved through such things. Cups, photographs, houses, clothes, plants, objects placed on shelves and possessions packed into boxes before a departure. They accompany births, separations, journeys and returns. Years later, a simple object can suddenly bring an entire moment back.
Zena Assi gives that quiet power a visual form. Her world is crowded because memory itself is crowded. Cities, people, animals, plants, wars, journeys and intimate details coexist inside it.
We would have liked to see more of this masterful work had it not been for the shipping difficulties and hinderances artists sometimes face in a country that craves for true art.
Leaving Ordinary Things, the simplest objects around us seem charged with another value. They have witnessed where we have been. And sometimes, long after a place has changed, an ordinary thing still remembers.
