Manazir Journal #7 (2025)

The Manazir Team is proud to announce the publication of Manazir Journal volume 7 (2025), titled “Defying the Violence: Lebanon’s Visual Arts in the 1980s,” edited by Nadia von Maltzahn (Orient-Institut Beirut).

This special issue delves into how Lebanon’s civil war during the 1980s shaped the country’s art world—a conflicted period during which artistic creation and exhibition practices have largely been overlooked. While conflict forced some exhibition spaces to close and artists to migrate, the 1980s also saw cultural infrastructures and artists adapting to the evolving context, and new spaces and art practices emerged.

The contributions address how the political, social and economic environment impacted everyday artistic production and reception. By challenging the conventional historical divide of pre-war “golden age”, wartime collapse, and post-war renewal in the 1990s, this issue offers a nuanced rethinking of periodization. It situates artistic trajectories within broader social, political, and transnational currents, speaking to overarching questions that are relevant for art historical inquiry in a broader sense.

The issue features seven peer-reviewed research articles and two perspectives. Together, they shed new light on a neglected decade and offer fresh insights into Lebanon’s visual arts that defied the violence.

Manazir Journal is a Platinum/Diamond Open Access journal (BOAI) and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). It is hosted by Bern Open Publishing (Bern Open Publishing). Manazir Journal endeavors to ensure the high quality of its content (COPE) and is committed to publish only original material. All articles undergo a peer review process.

You can find all volumes of Manazir Journal on its website: https://bop.unibe.ch/manazir/issue/view/1535.

Bern, Bern Open Publishing, 2025
ISSN: 2673-4354
Issue: 7
265 pages
Publication date: 17 December 2025