Beirut is a city with an identity crisis. Is it Arab, Mediterranean or European? Muslim or Christian? Is it the bastion of Resistance or the stronghold of tolerance? Is it the capital of a country that only became independent in 1943 or one of the oldest continually-inhabited cities on earth that was already ancient when Athens was born?
These are questions that Beirutis have yet to answer. Hopefully, they never will. Millennia of navigating their city’s multiple identities has bestowed upon them a natural cosmopolitanism that other more vocal aspirants to the mantle can never truly emulate. Beirut is cosmopolitan because it lives in a state of constant flux. As its inhabitants come and go, they bring new ideas, and because it is not in thrall to a single ideology or dominated by any single community, Beirut not only permits experimentation, it revels in it. Here we profile its new generation of movers and shakers and take a look at their work.

Ayman Baalbaki, painter
Ayman Baalbaki has the sharpest brush in Beirut. For the last decade, he has been flaying his country of its flesh through paintings and installations that explore the political turmoil in the Middle East. He references heavily his primary audience - his fellow citizens - as well as representing Beirut's seemingly never-ending process of construction, destruction and reconstruction.
If it sounds gloomy, it isn't. What sets Baalbaki apart is that he eschews rage. There's a warmth - even a humour - to his work which is less about making light of dark situations, and more about accepting that he lives in a region where life and death is all-too-often decided from 38,000-feet. Driven out of his village of Odeisse in 1976, Baalbaki was a refugee before his first birthday and went on to experience at first-hand life on the front-line'.
'I belong to a generation of Lebanese artists who don't have anything to say except about the war,' he says. 'We have been left with the contradictions of war but its reminders are being erased. I feel that the opposite is necessary, that we need to preserve reminders of it as well.'