Between Two Kingdoms marks Karimah Hassan’s return to Beirut following her 2025 solo exhibition with the gallery and subsequent residency, which became the generative ground for this body of work. Immersed in the intimate, porous rhythms of Beirut, Hassan draws from lived experience—moments of gathering, conversation, and shared meals—to construct paintings that hold both the weight and lightness of everyday life.
At the heart of this series is a sensibility shaped by simultaneity: grief yet joyous, politics alongside gossip, intimacy and transience. Hassan’s compositions echo the cadence of communal experience—tables expanding, voices overlapping, strangers folding into familiarity—where no emotion is singular and nothing is edited out. Her work resists hierarchy, allowing the mundane and the monumental to sit side by side, each carrying equal presence.
Rooted in her Middle Eastern heritage, Hassan’s practice is deeply attuned to the inheritance of generational trauma, yet it is not defined by it. Instead, her paintings locate moments of quiet resilience—gestures of care, acts of sharing, fleeting instances of joy—that persist despite broader conditions of instability and loss. Food, touch, and proximity become recurring motifs, functioning as both anchors and acts of resistance.
Between Two Kingdoms speaks to a space of in-betweenness: between past and present, rupture and repair, individual memory and collective experience. In these works, Hassan offers not resolution but continuity—an insistence on living, feeling, and gathering fully within contradiction. What emerges is a tender yet unflinching portrait of belonging, where hope is not abstract, but enacted daily, around the table, in the company of others.
