Summer in Lebanon rarely knows how to be subtle. By August, the calendar is overflowing. International DJs arrive for nights that stretch until sunrise, exhibitions open across the country, festivals take over mountains and coastlines, and every weekend comes with somewhere new to be.
Among all that noise, though, one of the summer’s more charming art interventions has been unfolding a little more quietly in Kfardebian.
At Les Jardins du Mzaar, the Mzaar Summer Festival – Art Edition takes one of the mountain’s most recognisable objects and asks us to see it differently. Old, unused ski chairlifts, once responsible for carrying generations of skiers across Mzaar’s slopes, have been handed over to artists and creatives to become sculptures, installations and objects of storytelling.
Curated and creatively directed by Gui Asmar, the premise is beautifully straightforward: rather than allowing these chairlifts to disappear into the resort’s past, give them another chapter.
“These chairlifts already carried years of memories and stories. I wanted each artist to give them a new chapter, a second life shaped by their own identity and creative language,” Asmar explains.
What emerges is less a conventional exhibition than a collection of individual worlds. Painting, craft, sculpture and mixed media collide with an object that almost everyone who grew up skiing in Lebanon immediately recognises. Seen under the summer sun rather than surrounded by snow, the chairlift suddenly becomes something else entirely. The exhibition plays deliberately with those opposites: past and present, winter and summer, function and imagination.
Some artists lean directly into the idea of transformation. Chloé Abboud and Ghada Kazan Abboud’s Pink Blossom uses the rose as a metaphor for life’s cycles, dormancy and renewal, reminding us that what appears to disappear during one season can bloom again in another.
Marie-Antoinette Chbeir’s A Seat of Serenity turns an old chair into a place for pause. Branches, flowers, birds, gold leaf and marble-like textures transform the industrial structure, with birds representing freedom and hope and flowers symbolising renewal. Set against the Mzaar landscape, the work becomes an invitation to stop for a moment and simply breathe.
Others approach the chairlift with humour. In Hani Akiki’s Blah Blah, two familiar mountain personalities share a ride: one determined to ski, the other far more interested in the social scene, lifestyle and inevitable social-media moment. It is a playful observation of Mzaar culture, where what happens around the slopes has often been as memorable as the skiing itself.
Sustainability enters the conversation through Ziad Dagher’s From Caps to Peaks, constructed from 4,323 reclaimed bottle caps representing more than 200 drink brands. After 240 hours of craftsmanship and 17,293 pin punches, discarded material becomes an image celebrating both Mzaar’s snowy winters and sunny summers.
Lebanon itself appears repeatedly throughout the exhibition. Annie Garois’s A Journey brings together Fairuz, the cedar tree, Beirut, the tarboush, traditional sayings and familiar local flavours, turning the ride into a visual passage through Lebanese identity and memory.
In Rust to Roots, KRISTIES LAB takes another route, bringing an abandoned ski lift back to life through references to the 3arishé, coffee rituals, tawlé and mountain gatherings. Here, renewal is not simply aesthetic. It is tied to hospitality and the rituals that make a place feel like home.
There are lighter interpretations too. Elise Salameh’s DREAM uses light, reflection and iridescence to turn its chairlift into what she describes as a booth of infinite dreams, hovering somewhere between reality and imagination. Karen Nawfal Douaihy’s Threads of Light, meanwhile, introduces hand-painted lace, copper and translucent beads that shift and shimmer with the sunlight, elevating an everyday piece of mountain infrastructure through delicate craftsmanship.
And perhaps that is what makes the Art Edition worth finding.
At a time when summer can feel increasingly programmed around the biggest booking, loudest opening or most photographed night, Mzaar has created something rooted in memory. These works do not erase what the chairlifts used to be. They build on it.
Objects made to carry people up a mountain now carry stories about resilience, dreams, sustainability, Lebanese identity, humour and renewal.
You may have missed the Mzaar Summer Festival – Art Edition among everything happening in Lebanon this August. But sometimes the quieter discoveries are precisely the ones worth making the trip for.
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