Nabil Nahas: Don’t Get Me Wrong

The Pavilion of Lebanon will present Don't Get Me Wrong, an exhibition by Nabil Nahas and curated by Nada Ghandour, for the 61st Venice Biennale. Located in the Arsenale, the monumental installation spans across forty-five linear meters and is composed of twenty-six acrylic-on-canvas panels.

The artist explores the relationship between man, nature, and the cosmos in this immersive work, offering a visual and spiritual experience which transforms the spectacular into a vehicle for introspection.

Reflecting Lebanon’s fluid and multicultural identity, the Pavilion celebrates unity in diversity and the beauty of contradictions, in line with the artistic research Nabil Nahas has been pursuing over several decades, travelling between Lebanon and the United States.

Each panel rises three metres high and is arranged side by side to form a monumental, enveloping frieze that invites visitors to move through it. Rather than unfolding as a linear narrative, the installation resists fixed interpretation, offering an experience to be lived rather than an image to be deciphered.

The compositions feature a rich, complex visual language, where different types of geometric abstractions, inspired by Islamic and Western traditions, meet figuration and fractal patterns, forming an unexpected continuum.

The geometric forms evoke the mathematical structure of the cosmic order: a unified ensemble, the universe is composed of the infinitely small and the infinitely large. Certain patterns repeat across all scales, in both the animal kingdom and nature, reminding us that humanity is part of an infinite whole. Likewise, the spiral—a symbol of infinity drawn from Sufi mysticism—acts as a hypnotic force on the mind, guiding an intimate, inward journey.

The tree motif, central to Nabil Nahas’s work, embodies the tension between rootedness and transcendence through tree species found in biblical texts, including the cedar—the mythical tree of the Lebanese mountains, symbolizing endurance and strength—and the olive, an allegory of life.

Through this installation, Nabil Nahas celebrates Lebanon as a land of confluences, where communities rooted for centuries have shaped a plural identity. Rather than a mere collection of disjointed fragments, this identity is seen and represented as a living, coherent entity, constantly evolving and perpetually in motion.

The history of Lebanon is that of an extraordinary crossroads, a place where great civilizations have emerged, succeeded one another, and intersected. In Nabil Nahas’s work, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Byzantine, and Islamic influences reflect the country’s layered, centuries-old heritage.

Don’t Get Me Wrong can be read as a sensitive topography of the country. For the artist, the memory of his homeland is a polyphony, composed of echoes and resonances that extend into his own life: after growing up between Lebanon and Cairo, Nahas settled in New York. Following an 18-year absence, he returned to Lebanon for a brief visit after the civil war—a visit that marked the beginning of increasingly frequent returns.

The scenography of the Pavilion is conceived by Charles Kettaneh and Nicolas Fayad—EAST Architecture Studio.