Beirut’s wounds on show in display of art damaged by port blast

Beirut’s wounds on show in display of art damaged by port blast

Through the entrance is a version of Guido Reni's 17th-century portrait of St John the Baptist, blown to shreds. Nearby, a chandelier lies splattered on the ground where it fell. Mirrors are cracked, paintings ruptured, and roofs in some rooms half-caved in.Beirut is slowly rebuilding from the explosion on 4 August that destroyed much of its eastern seafront neighbourhoods and tore through galleries and hotel lobbies where some of Lebanon's most renowned art was on display.A new exhibition in the city seeks not to put artworks together again but to remake them, despite the gashes in canvasses and grazes in sculptured stone. Wounded Art, a collection of works damaged and destroyed by the blast, opened this month in the city's Villa Audi, a mosaic museum that was itself badly hit.In small rooms with curated music and passages from Lebanese writing and verse, lights mounted behind the canvases call attention to damage done to each work.“The idea was to build the piece of art again without touching it,” says the curator, Jean-Louis Mainguy. “To build it again with music, with Lebanese poetry and literature, and of course the light.”Nayla Romanos Iliya's sculpture Entangled Love had been in the lobby of Beirut's