Beirut, Recurring Dream
Photographer Tanya Traboulsi explores Beirut as a landscape shaped by memory, exile, and imagination. Blending photographs with archival traces, the work navigates the tension between past and present, reality and fiction. The series is a lived place and dreamscape: fragile, unresolved, and continuously reimagined through the echoes of personal and collective history.
Photography Tanya Traboulsi
Beirut, Recurring Dream is an attempt to inhabit a city that exists both in reality and in imagination; a place lived, remembered, and continuously re-staged in the mind. Beirut is not a stable geography but a shifting scenario: a city fractured by war, absence, and exile, yet charged with the enduring ability to seduce, unsettle, and dream itself anew.
As a child, I left Beirut in 1983, in the midst of the civil war, carrying fragments of memory. I remembered the checkpoints on the way to school, the scent of the sea at the corniche, and the smell of orange blossom from the Beiruti gardens. Decades later, when I returned as an adult, the city revealed itself as both familiar and strange, layered with histories I had missed yet carried inside me unconsciously. My photographs seek to navigate this paradox: the impossibility of reconciling past and present, memory and reality, loss and desire.
In Beirut, Recurring Dream, the city appears not as documentary truth but as a stage where imagination fills the gaps of history. Through images that hover between the intimate and the collective, I construct scenarios that oscillate between utopian longing and the darkness of memory. Photographs of abandoned interiors, luminous seascapes, and fleeting encounters are woven with archival material, creating a space where reality and fiction collapse into one another. Beirut emerges as a city that refuses resolution: it is as much a dreamscape as a lived environment.
Beirut, Recurring Dream is an attempt to inhabit a city that exists both in reality and in imagination; a place lived, remembered, and continuously re-staged in the mind.
My images are not illustrations of fact, but invitations to imagine; to sense the weight of history in an empty room, to hear echoes in a photograph of silence, to feel intimacy across absence. They are stagings of memory and desire, born of both distance and return.
In an era where narratives of war and crisis often flatten Beirut into a stereotype, Beirut, Recurring Dream insists on complexity. It is not a simple testimony, but a shifting stage where scenarios unfold: dreams of return, fears of loss, moments of fragile beauty. In this way, the work asks how we construct belonging when home is both present and lost, and how photography can give form to the unseen – not to escape reality, but to reimagine it.
“Beirut is (…) a city fractured by war, absence, and exile, yet charged with the enduring ability to seduce, unsettle, and dream itself anew.”
About Tanya
Tanya Traboulsi is a photographer based in Beirut. Her work explores highly personal themes of belonging, identity and memory, using the image as a narrative tool. Her practice often combines her photography with material from her family archive, both of which frequently center around Beirut as a significant recurring theme.
She is a recipient of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, and her work has been exhibited internationally, including recent presentations of Beirut, Recurring Dream in the UK, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Austria, Morocco, and Dubai. Her collaborative project Le Rocher was on view at Mucem in Marseille. In recent years, she has also exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien, Beirut Art Center, Bildraum 01, and numerous other venues.
Tanya’s photographs have appeared in publications like the British Journal of Photography, Aperture Magazine, WePresent, Byline, Monocle, It’s Nice That, Vogue Arabia, This Is Yung and many others. Her body of work documenting the Lebanese alternative music scene was assembled in the 2010 publication Untitled Tracks: On Alternative Music in Beirut. Her monograph, entitled Lost Strange Things: On not finding home, was published by Triton in 2014. Her book A Sea Apart, bringing together photographs from her series Beirut, Recurring Dream, was published by Out Of Place Books in November 2024. Tanya’s first short film Son of the sun (2021) recounts the explosion in the port of Beirut in August 2020 and has been screened at renowned film festivals such as DIAGONALE ‘23, LE FIFA and IDFA.
To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram
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