When Beirut Was a Cinema brings together fifteen paintings by Yervant Harwarian that revisit this chapter of Beirut's cultural memory, reimagining cinemas and theatres such as Cinema Royal, Piccadilly, Rialto, Byblos, Cristal, Hollywood, the Grand Theatre, and the National Theatre, landmarks around which the city once moved.
Since the early 2000s, Yervant Hawarian has often returned to this world through his practice, transforming imagery once created for public display into reflections on memory, place, and cultural history. The young Hawarian once painted the images that invited Beirut into the cinema. Today, he paints the cinemas so that we may enter that Beirut once again. For a moment, the city was not merely a place with cinemas; the city itself was cinema.