Beirut, Recurring Dream

Tanya Traboulsi

2021 – Ongoing — Beirut, Lebanon

About this series

My project Beirut, Recurring Dream is an attempt to inhabit a city that exists both in reality and in imagination; a place lived, remembered, and continuously reimagined. Beirut is not a stable geography but a shifting landscape shaped by war, absence, exile, and longing.
I left Beirut in 1983 during the Lebanese Civil War, carrying fragments of memory: checkpoints on the way to school, the scent of the sea along the Corniche, and the orange blossom of Beirut’s gardens. Decades later, returning as an adult, I encountered a city that felt both familiar and strange, layered with histories I had missed yet somehow carried within me.
Through photography, I navigate the space between memory and reality, past and present. In Beirut, Recurring Dream, the city appears not as documentary truth but as a stage where imagination fills the gaps left by history. Photographs of abandoned interiors, luminous seascapes, and fleeting encounters are woven together with archival material, creating a space where reality and fiction collapse into one another.
Rather than illustrating facts, the images invite viewers to imagine: to sense the weight of history in an empty room, to hear echoes in silence, and to feel intimacy across absence. Born from both distance and return, the work reflects on how belonging is constructed when home is simultaneously present and lost.
At a time when Beirut is often reduced to narratives of conflict, Beirut, Recurring Dream insists on complexity, fragility, and the possibility of imagining otherwise.

Photographer: Tanya Traboulsi
Nationality: Lebanese
Based in: Beirut, Lebanon
Website: www.tanyatraboulsi.com
Instagram: @tanya_traboulsi

Tanya Traboulsi is a Beirut-based photographer whose work explores memory, displacement, and belonging through photography and archival material. A recipient of the 2025 V&A Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, she is best known for her ongoing project Beirut, Recurring Dream, which examines the city as a space shaped by memory, history, and imagination.
Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in publications including Aperture, British Journal of Photography, Byline, Monocle, and many others. She is the author of A Sea Apart (Out of Place Books, 2024) and the short film Son of the Sun (2021).