Deanna Ansara presents Mountains City and Sea, a photography-based installation exploring return, belonging, memory, and the layered realities of Lebanon and the wider Levant. In its second and final iteration, the exhibition returns from New York City and Detroit to the land that shaped it, inviting viewers to move through a dreamscape where the surface gives way to deeper histories, emotional textures, and personal discovery.
Created from analog photographs taken between Spring 2024 and April 2026, the work began as a personal archive, a form of preservation for the artist and those she loves during a period of solitary exploration. What began as a way to remember and share fragments of time gradually opened into a larger invitation when a friend, Elevine Berge, proposed curating a show in Brooklyn, January 2025. The exhibition was brought back to Beirut for its second iteration in May 2026.: to enter the world as Ansara sees and feels it, through the mountains, the sea, and cities built on top of cities.
The installation exists in an in-between space, where past and present blur and time is not linear. Through photography, a 20 minute sound-scape of personal recordings, and writing imbued with history, Ansara creates dialogues between generations, places, and states of memory. The exhibition becomes a portal into a land connection that exists beyond words, an uncovering of layers and a tender act of reclamation.
A personal ode to Lebanon, Mountains City and Sea looks beyond loss and fragmentation without denying their presence. It holds space for complexity: beauty and grief, distance and closeness, rupture and continuity. These works are not only images, but fragments of research and a collective memory, tenderly assembled.
As accompanying writer Aurore Vullierme reflects, the installation offers “glimpses of life and connection amid the shadow of violence and loss.” It asks what it means to hold onto moments both distant and near, refusing to let them be eclipsed. Mountains City and Sea is an invitation to explore, deconstruct, and remember, piece by piece, memory by memory.
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