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Come and join us at LÁ Art Museum on Saturday 7th of February at 15:00 for the opening of the exhibition Toxic Grounds - Bernard Khoury. Curator: Yara Zein
The artist Bernard Khoury draws attention to how buildings store and tell stories. Through images and narratives, he invites viewers to sense the hidden burdens of the past embedded in architecture in the form of memory. Khoury allows the noise of Beirut’s troubled streets to echo into a peaceful Icelandic environment.
This is his first exhibition in Iceland, and it is a confrontation. Installed across Gallery 1 at LÁ Art Museum the exhibition unfolds through spatial storytelling. It offers no neutral ground. It draws you in and implicates you.
Khoury tells stories others are afraid to touch. Stories embedded in terrain marked by conflict, exile, surveillance, seduction. His artistic vision gives shape to territories that resist pacification, that do not lend themselves to clean resolutions or easy readings.
BO18 remains one of his most iconic and controversial statements. A nightclub dug into the former quarantine zone of Beirut. A site marked by epidemic, war, and political disappearance. Khoury chose not to conceal that legacy. He built into it. BO18 did not shock because of its form. It shocked because it exposed what others had worked hard to forget.
This is the logic that underpins the works in this exhibition. Machines of memory. Instruments of disturbance. These are not commemorative. They are operational. They move. They speak. They insist.
Khoury’s practice refuses nostalgia. It is seductive and brutal in equal measure. His installations activate space like a political act. They are not polite gestures. They are sharp, deliberate intrusions.
This exhibition invites the viewer to meet a culture where Khoury’s voice enters a context physically and historically different from his own. Here, on Icelandic ground, geologically violent and politically stable, the encounter becomes even more charged.
What does it mean to import work born of instability into a landscape shaped by natural force? What happens when the noise of Beirut’s haunted ground is allowed to echo in the silence of the Icelandic countryside?
This is not an architectural exhibition. It is not an aesthetic offering. It is an intrusion.