Between Us: Curating in / on / around crises

Launched in May 2025, Between Us is a curatorial proposition put together by TAP curator Nour Osseiran, that is shaped by Beirut’s ongoing ruptures – political, infrastructural, temporal –and by the acts of gathering, nourishing, and making meaning that persist within them. It began with a recurring question: what does it mean to curate in the midst of ongoing crises? In Beirut, these are not exceptional moments – they are the baseline. And still, people gather, host, and make meaning.

The publication was born from this impulse, and from a desire to broaden what we mean when we say curating. What happens when the frameworks we inherit – Eurocentric, institutional, material-oriented – don’t hold? When curating becomes not about interpretation, but survival, adaptation, repair?

At TAP, we’ve witnessed how curating here becomes a mode of engagement. It emerges from the ground up, from listening, trying, failing, adjusting. From learning by doing.

We invited six practitioners across fields – a chef and a venue organizer, a trauma surgeon and an anthropologist, an artist and an ophthalmologist – to take part in three informal conversations.

Across three informal conversations, six practitioners from different fields – a chef, an artist, a surgeon, a venue organizer, an anthropologist, and an ophthalmologist – reflected on joy, repair, and vision. Not as abstract themes, but as living practices and embodied responses to life in Beirut.

Between Us is not an answer, but a methodology. A way of being together, of co-creating meaning in real time, across disciplines and experiences. It is part of an ongoing inquiry into how art can respond – urgently, tenderly, radically – to the contexts it finds itself in.