Zahraa Hammoud: My Life With Arturo
Zahraa Hammoud is a Lebanese artist currently pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts at the Lebanese University. Her practice is shaped by strong humanitarian concerns and a sustained engagement with contemporary art as a means of addressing social, cultural, and existential questions. Through experimentation with different materials and techniques, Hammoud explores postmodern and posthumanist ideas while remaining deeply connected to lived realities in Lebanon.
Alongside her interest in mythology and culture, Hammoud works extensively with woodcarving. From this practice emerged Arturo, a wooden figurine that has become central to her recent body of work. Arturo functions as a stand-in for young artists in Lebanon, embodying the challenges of artistic creation in a context marked by crisis, uncertainty, and limited resources. Rather than approaching these struggles through overt symbolism, Hammoud adopts an understated and intimate language, allowing meaning to emerge through form, gesture, and repetition.
My Life With Arturo develops this approach into a broader installation combining carved wooden figures with visual and photographic works. Across the exhibition, Arturo appears in everyday situations—thinking, hesitating, loving, falling, and standing again. These small moments reflect a wider condition: the persistent effort to continue creating despite doubt, fatigue, and instability. In this sense, artistic practice becomes not only a form of expression, but also a strategy of survival, imagination, and dignity.
Hammoud’s work does not isolate Arturo as a singular character. Instead, the figure multiplies across objects and images, suggesting a shared experience rather than an individual story. This repetition mirrors the realities faced by many young artists in Lebanon, where personal and collective struggles intersect. The exhibition thus moves between the personal and the social, grounding abstract ideas in tangible materials and recognizable situations.
Beyond My Life With Arturo, Hammoud has also worked with watercolor to depict areas such as Dahieh and Khandak Al-Ghameek from a humanitarian perspective, resisting dominant narratives that reduce these spaces to stereotypes. Her work seeks to reframe overlooked environments and experiences through sensitivity, attention, and care. Two of her sculptural works have been recognized internationally, having been accepted by the Svenska Museum in Sweden.
Through installation, sculpture, and image-making, Zahraa Hammoud’s practice offers a quiet yet insistent reflection on what it means to create under pressure. My Life With Arturo does not propose solutions, but instead invites viewers to inhabit a space where vulnerability, resilience, and imagination coexist—revealing art as a living process shaped by persistence and human connection.
