Secteur Privé is pleased to present Between Two Kingdoms, a solo exhibition by British-Yemeni artist Karimah Hassan, opening on 27 May and running through 24 June 2026 in London. The exhibition follows her acclaimed Beirut solo exhibition soleil! and her 2025 summer residency in the city, where this body of work began.
Developed between London and Beirut, Between Two Kingdoms unfolds as a meditation on place, memory, and contradiction. Set between immediacy and reflection, the paintings draw from Karimah’s lived experience of Beirut as a city suspended between extremes—glamour and grief, celebration and survival, spirituality and unrest. Positioned at the intersection where multi-religions meet from East to West, the works explore what it means to exist, and to create, within a space defined by tension, beauty, and continual transformation.
At its core, the exhibition asks how painting might honour the present moment while reaching beyond it. Drawing on field notes, personal encounters, and fragments of everyday life, Karimah’s compositions move fluidly between the intimate and the collective. Works such as Layla and Desert Rose evoke dreamlike, almost mythological states, while Red Sun over Chouf captures a quiet moment—an instance of stillness suspended in time. In contrast, scenes of nightlife and conversation reflect Beirut’s enduring social vitality, a city that insists on living fully despite precarity.
Karimah’s imagery oscillates between the real and the surreal, underscoring a persistent duality. While not explicitly political, Hassan’s work operates as an act of witnessing—a tribute to Beirut’s cultural richness, layered histories, and enduring creative force.
Across the series, Karimah constructs a visual language that is both personal and expansive, grounded in observation yet reaching toward the timeless. As the artist reflects: “In a collapsing world, beauty isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. I came to Beirut and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time—a raw, generous joy that is deeply spiritual. The people here know that every minute of peace is euphoric. There is a slang phrase, ‘Dabkeet’, that comes from the dance ‘dabke’ and, in its essence, means to celebrate; in the face of grief, to dance. This series is my attempt to bottle that aliveness and bring it to canvas.”
Taking its title from one of the exhibited works, Between Two Kingdoms positions Beirut not only as subject, but as metaphor: a place suspended between worlds, where joy and grief coexist, and where beauty becomes an act of defiance.
