Conversation between Marwa Arsanios, Shuruq Harb – who will join the discussion digitally – and Omar Itani, led by Sarah Lookofsky. Part of BEK symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change 2025: Voice, Seed, Brutality.

MARWA ARSANIOS
Marwa Arsanios’ practice tackles structural questions using different devices, forms and strategies. From architectural spaces, their transformation, and adaptability throughout a civil war, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions between communes and cooperatives, her practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures. This allows experimentation with different forms of assemblies. Film becomes another device and space for connecting struggles through images and montage.
In the past nine years, Arsanios has been attempting to think about these questions from both a new materialist and a historical materialist perspective. She has worked with different feminist movements that are in a struggle to reclaim their land. Her focus includes questions of property, law, economy and ecology examined through specific plots of land. She also studies the histories of the commons in the Levant region. Arsanios has been part of several artist collectives and initiatives. The most recent involves the legal communalisation of a land in North Lebanon through its transformation to a Mashaa.

Several solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her work: Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023); Mosaïc Rooms, London (2022); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana (2018); Beirut Art Center (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2015); and Art in General, New York (2015).

Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: Documenta 15, Kassel (2022), 11th Berlin Biennale (2020), SF Moma, San Francisco (2019), Home Works Forum, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2010, 2013, 2015), New Museum, New York (2014), 55th Venice Biennial (2013), M HKA, Antwerp (2013), and the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

SHURUQ HARB
Shuruq Harb is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, filmmaker, and writer based in Ramallah, Palestine. On the occasion of the Busan Biennale (2024), she presented the first iteration of Off You Shore Paper Trail, a collaborative film project with Federica Bueti which looks at modern maritime histories, piracy, and mobility in the Mediterranean Sea. Harb’s latest essay, “An Hour Ahead and One Day Behind”, was published in kyklàda.press’s latest edition entitled Machine Paralysis, 2025. She is a contributing faculty to PRAXIS: fluent’s Study Programme 2025. Her exhibition “Interrupted Futures (2026)” opens at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2026.

OMAR ITANI
Omar Itani is a noise artist and sound designer based in Beirut, Lebanon. His work ranges across various activities, including sound design for film, sound art, installations, field recordings and live performance.

Sarah Lookofsky
Sarah Lookofsky is Director of Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, a kunsthalle founded by artists in 1930 that includes exhibition spaces, a cinema, and artist studios. As the institution approaches its centennial, Sarah hopes to explore how art and its institutional armatures inherit and respond to histories amid contemporary crises.

Sarah is working with Shuruq Harb on an exhibition of new work for Kunstnernes Hus, set to open at the beginning of 2026.

Previously, Sarah was Associate Director of MoMA’s International Program in New York, focusing on modern and contemporary art from Africa, Asia, LatinAmerica, and Central and Eastern Europe. She has also worked at the intersection of art and education, serving as Dean of the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo (2020–2023) and as faculty and head of the Curatorial Studies program at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2010–14). Sarah has curated and published widely across platforms, served as General Advisor to the 9th Berlin Biennale, and was Arts Editor for DIS Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego.