Beirut's art scene rebuilt itself in public after August 2020: a restored Ottoman villa museum, white-cube galleries in warehouse Karantina, a Hamra basement where tarab cabaret sells out. Three days of visual art, theatre and neighbourhoods carrying their own archives.
A 1912 Venetian-Ottoman villa on Rue Sursock, gutted by the port blast and reopened May 2023 after a three-year restoration. Four levels of Lebanese modernists, the Fouad Debbas photo archive and rebuilt stained glass. Closed Mondays.
Youssef Aftimus's 1924 apartment block at the Sodeco crossing, whose sniper-hollowed façade was deliberately left unrepaired when it became a civil-war museum. Bullet-cut sightlines, sandbag nests and Ottoman arcades survive intact.
Andrée Sfeir-Semler's 1,200 m² space on the fourth floor of a Karantina warehouse, opened 2005 as the region's first international-standard gallery. Walid Raad, Etel Adnan and Rabih Mroué shows. Tue–Fri 10:00–18:00, Sat to 16:00.
David Adjaye's red-latticed slab on the Antelias seafront holding Tony Salamé's contemporary collection — Sterling Ruby, Rashid Johnson, Urs Fischer — across two floors above the shop. The sea terrace faces west over the bay.
Lebanon's archaeological flagship, itself a front line during the war. Roughly 1,300 objects run from Byblos gold to the Phoenician anthropoid sarcophagi and Tyre's Achilles mosaic; the basement shows the concrete-encased pieces saved in 1975.
Salim Eddé's private museum under the USJ science campus: about 2,000 crystals from 70 countries in blacked-out vitrines, rated among the finest private collections anywhere, plus Lebanese amber holding 130-million-year-old insects.
A converted furniture warehouse in the industrial Jisr el Wati strip, non-profit since 2009 and the city's steadiest platform for research-driven contemporary work from the region. Video library, bookshop and a courtyard café for the interval.
A basement cabaret under the old Saroulla cinema on Hamra Street: red velvet, the long-running Hishik Bishik Egyptian tarab revue, Sunday oud recitals and Arabic political satire that draws a crowd of regulars every week.
Two dozen dust-thick shops below Bechara el-Khoury selling Ottoman brass, art-deco chandeliers, Damascene mother-of-pearl chests and convincing reproductions of all three. Shops open roughly 09:00–17:00 and stay shut on Sundays.
A 1930s villa left empty for decades and occupied by artists in 2012 with the owner's blessing: free studios, a shared kitchen, screenings and talks, and a garden of mismatched chairs where the crowd argues into the afternoon.
The Armenian quarter laid out by 1915 genocide survivors, its streets named Marash, Adana and Sis after the towns they fled. At Badguer, Arpi Mangassarian's restored 1930s house, women cook manti and itch while craft workshops run upstairs.
A 125-step Mandate-era staircase climbing from the port slope to Rue Sursock, hung with jasmine and used each year as an open-air art fair. Neighbours sit out on the treads at dusk; the top frames Achrafieh against the port cranes.