Close-up of the installation by Joyce Joumaa, winner of the Art Basel fair. (Credit: Art Basel)
There is a kind of choreography to living in darkness. In Lebanon, it’s a rhythm you learn early: which hour the generator cuts, which socket to trust, which light flickers with state power and which on the generator. Artist Joyce Joumaa, born in 1998 and raised between Beirut and Montreal, sculpted this choreography into “Periodic Sights,” an installation that earned her the prestigious Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2025.“I started keeping an eye after 2019 on the ‘générateur’ like any Lebanese, we kept going to the junction box, checking for electricity,” she said. “So, it became a movement in the everyday life of a Lebanese household.”That everyday movement, almost banal in its repetition, is what Joumaa transformed into a luminous testimony. Her work, Periodic Sights, is a 28-piece grid of fuse boxes, each fitted with photographs...
There is a kind of choreography to living in darkness. In Lebanon, it’s a rhythm you learn early: which hour the generator cuts, which socket to trust, which light flickers with state power and which on the generator. Artist Joyce Joumaa, born in 1998 and raised between Beirut and Montreal, sculpted this choreography into “Periodic Sights,” an installation that earned her the prestigious Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel 2025.“I started keeping an eye after 2019 on the ‘générateur’ like any Lebanese, we kept going to the junction box, checking for electricity,” she said. “So, it became a movement in the everyday life of a Lebanese household.”That everyday movement, almost banal in its repetition, is what Joumaa transformed into a luminous testimony. Her work, Periodic Sights, is a 28-piece grid of fuse boxes, each...
