# Who Owns a Sea That Crosses Every Border? Beirut’s ‘Mare Nostrum’ Opened > MKNIRALO — Culture — Beirut · Exhibition - Published: 2026-11-07 - Estimated reading time: 6 minutes - Byline: Safi — Living Heritage & Community Arts Observer - Byline disclosure: Safi is a house editorial byline maintained by MKNIRALO, not a claim of an independently verified individual. It does not imply Akha community membership, nationality, firsthand exhibition attendance, interviews or cultural authority. - Author profile: https://mkniralo.com/authors/safi/ - Tags: Lebanon, Beirut, Contemporary Art, Mediterranean, Museums, Exhibitions - Cover image: https://mkniralo.com/images/beirut-sursock-mare-nostrum-exhibition-2026.svg Opened on 6 November at Beirut’s Sursock Museum, Lily Abichahine’s solo exhibition, curated by Yasmine Helou, uses the Mediterranean to question how law, myth and borders shape a shared sea. At 6pm on Friday, 6 November, Sursock Museum in Beirut opened Mare Nostrum, a solo exhibition by Lily Abichahine curated by Yasmine Helou. The exhibition runs through 21 February 2027 and occupies the museum’s Twin Galleries on the ground floor. Its premise begins with a deceptively simple observation: the Mediterranean is one moving body of water, while political and legal systems divide the shores and the spaces between them. The museum’s text presents that tension as the exhibition’s starting point, not as a problem with a single answer. ## An opening built around a question The museum’s listing identifies Mare Nostrum as a solo exhibition by Abichahine, with Helou as curator, and gives the dates as 6 November 2026 to 21 February 2027. It places the exhibition in the Twin Galleries, ground floor, and specifies an opening on Friday, 6 November at 6pm. The museum’s main exhibition page and its dedicated exhibition text agree on those details. Artmena’s separate listing gives the same dates, venue and opening time, describing the presentation as a solo exhibition. There is no material date discrepancy between the two listings reviewed for this article. That agreement matters because cultural calendars often distinguish an opening event from the public exhibition period. Here, the opening was a scheduled event at 6pm on the first day; the longer run continues for more than three months. The available information does not describe a separate invitation-only event or an earlier press preview, so none should be inferred. The essential point is straightforward: the museum has announced a public exhibition window, and the opening time is separately stated. Sources: - [Mare Nostrum by Lily Abichahine](https://sursock.museum/content/mare-nostrum-lily-abichahine) — Sursock Museum - [Exhibitions](https://sursock.museum/exhibitions) — Sursock Museum - [Mare Nostrum at Sursock Museum | Artmena](https://artmena.com/exhibitions/mare-nostrum-sursock-museum-2026) — Artmena ## A Mediterranean imagined as one moving body The exhibition takes its title from Abichahine’s ongoing project on the Mediterranean, which Artmena dates to 2021. The museum traces the project’s starting point to a fisherman’s remark recorded in one of the artist’s notes: “the Mediterranean Sea travels.” The sentence shifts attention from coastlines to circulation. Rather than beginning with separate national shorelines, the project begins with the basin’s physical continuity. The museum connects that idea to cities where Abichahine has lived and worked as an artist-in-residence: Marseille, İzmir, Palermo and Beirut. The curatorial text turns from movement to classification: if the water is continuous, what makes one stretch politically or legally distinct from another? In the museum’s framing, the question is who can claim a sea that crosses every border. The sea is presented as difficult to fit within fixed political boundaries, because its physical continuity does not follow the lines drawn on land. This is an artistic question about the tension between a connected marine environment and the systems that partition territory—not a claim that borders disappear. Sources: - [Mare Nostrum by Lily Abichahine](https://sursock.museum/content/mare-nostrum-lily-abichahine) — Sursock Museum - [Mare Nostrum at Sursock Museum | Artmena](https://artmena.com/exhibitions/mare-nostrum-sursock-museum-2026) — Artmena ## Law, myth and the artist’s method Abichahine’s question is also legal. The museum quotes her observation that, “From a legal point of view, land has always had a hierarchy over water.” The curatorial text describes her as reversing that usual priority: she invites audiences to consider the rules and categories applied to water itself, and to imagine the Mediterranean as a connected whole rather than a set of separate spaces defined by land borders. The question is presented as an artistic inquiry, not a legal finding or a proposal for a new maritime regime. Artmena describes Abichahine as a lawyer, researcher and artist, and says the wider project, which shares the exhibition’s title, began in 2021. The museum’s account gives myth a historical role: older stories, it says, once helped shape moral and legal order before formal legal systems existed. Abichahine draws on these narratives not simply as symbols but as a way of reopening questions about history, territory and authority. This gives the exhibition a framework that moves between contemporary geography, legal concepts and older narratives without requiring the reader to assume that the show offers a single political position. Sources: - [Mare Nostrum by Lily Abichahine](https://sursock.museum/content/mare-nostrum-lily-abichahine) — Sursock Museum - [Mare Nostrum at Sursock Museum | Artmena](https://artmena.com/exhibitions/mare-nostrum-sursock-museum-2026) — Artmena ## A museum shaped by a longer cultural history The venue brings its own history to that conversation. Sursock Museum grew from the bequest of Lebanese collector Nicolas Sursock, who left his mansion to the citizens of Lebanon for use as an art museum. The museum’s history records that its doors opened on 18 November 1961 with the Salon d’Automne, an open-call exhibition intended to show new art. The museum says its programme has since included work from Lebanon and abroad, and that it remained open through most of the Lebanese Civil War. The institution’s story is not a straight line of uninterrupted operation. It closed in 2008 for major renovation and expansion, with the project completed in 2014, and reopened in October 2015. That earlier renovation enlarged the museum’s space and modernized the building. The details are relevant to Mare Nostrum mainly because they establish the museum as a long-standing public cultural institution rather than a temporary exhibition venue. Its present programme sits within a history of collection, display and periodic rebuilding. Sources: - [History](https://sursock.museum/content/history) — Sursock Museum ## Repair after the 2020 Beirut port explosion That history was interrupted again by the Beirut port explosion of 4 August 2020. UNESCO reported in October 2020 that the Sursock Museum was among the city’s cultural institutions severely damaged by the blasts. A separate UNESCO statement in August 2020 placed the museum within a wider emergency effort to protect Beirut’s damaged museums, historic districts and cultural sites. These sources establish the scale of the damage and the cultural response; they do not require this exhibition to be framed primarily through the disaster. By May 2023, UNESCO announced that its rehabilitation project for the museum had been completed, following €1 million in funding from Italy through the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation. The UN release says earlier support for the first phase came from France and the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, known as ALIPH. The museum’s own reopening notice records almost three years of closure and thanks ALIPH, the French Ministry of Culture, Italy’s development agency with UNESCO-Li Beirut, in-kind donors and individual supporters. It announced reopening on 26 May 2023. These are documented restoration and reopening facts, not a claim that all wider damage to Beirut’s cultural sector was resolved. Sources: - [Your Museum is back!](https://sursock.museum/content/your-museum-back?page=0) — Sursock Museum - [Beirut: Rebuilding the future through education and culture](https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/beirut-rebuilding-future-through-education-and-culture-0) — UNESCO - [UNESCO rallies international community to safeguard Beirut’s cultural life and heritage](https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-rallies-international-community-safeguard-beiruts-cultural-life-and-heritage) — UNESCO - [UNESCO completed the rehabilitation of the iconic Sursock museum damaged by Beirut port explosions](https://lebanon.un.org/en/231183-unesco-completed-rehabilitation-iconic-sursock-museum-damaged-beirut-port-explosions) — United Nations in Lebanon ## What visitors can confirm before they go For visitors, Artmena lists the museum’s regular hours as Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm, and admission as free. Those details are published by the independent listing, while the museum’s exhibition page confirms the Twin Galleries location, the exhibition dates and the 6pm opening. Visitors should check the museum’s own current visitor information before travelling, since schedules and access arrangements can change. The exhibition is scheduled to remain on view until 21 February 2027. This account is limited to what the museum and the exhibition listing have announced. The official exhibition text describes the project’s conceptual questions, but does not provide a checklist of individual works on the page reviewed. It would therefore be premature to name unlisted works, describe the installation or judge how the exhibition uses the galleries. Those questions belong to a later account based on the exhibition as actually presented. For now, Mare Nostrum has opened in Beirut with a question about what borders can divide, and what a moving sea may continue to connect. Sources: - [Mare Nostrum by Lily Abichahine](https://sursock.museum/content/mare-nostrum-lily-abichahine) — Sursock Museum - [Exhibitions](https://sursock.museum/exhibitions) — Sursock Museum - [Mare Nostrum at Sursock Museum | Artmena](https://artmena.com/exhibitions/mare-nostrum-sursock-museum-2026) — Artmena - [Your Museum is back!](https://sursock.museum/content/your-museum-back?page=0) — Sursock Museum ## About this article This article reflects the public sources available on the publication and update dates shown above. For developing stories, follow the linked source pages for subsequent statements or decisions. ## Sources and further reading - [Mare Nostrum by Lily Abichahine](https://sursock.museum/content/mare-nostrum-lily-abichahine) — Sursock Museum (accessed 2026-11-06) - [Exhibitions](https://sursock.museum/exhibitions) — Sursock Museum (accessed 2026-11-06) - [Mare Nostrum at Sursock Museum | Artmena](https://artmena.com/exhibitions/mare-nostrum-sursock-museum-2026) — Artmena (accessed 2026-11-06) - [History](https://sursock.museum/content/history) — Sursock Museum (accessed 2026-11-06) - [Your Museum is back!](https://sursock.museum/content/your-museum-back?page=0) — Sursock Museum (accessed 2026-11-06) - [Beirut: Rebuilding the future through education and culture](https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/beirut-rebuilding-future-through-education-and-culture-0) — UNESCO (published 2020-10-08) (accessed 2026-11-06) - [UNESCO rallies international community to safeguard Beirut’s cultural life and heritage](https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-rallies-international-community-safeguard-beiruts-cultural-life-and-heritage) — UNESCO (published 2020-08-13) (accessed 2026-11-06) - [UNESCO completed the rehabilitation of the iconic Sursock museum damaged by Beirut port explosions](https://lebanon.un.org/en/231183-unesco-completed-rehabilitation-iconic-sursock-museum-damaged-beirut-port-explosions) — United Nations in Lebanon (published 2023-05-11) (accessed 2026-11-06)