Themes of memory, belonging, and identity are recurring motifs in Traboulsi’s work. Born in 1976, a year after the start of Lebanon’s civil war, her family fled the country in 1983 to the safety of Austria, her mother’s home country. But a longing for Lebanon remained.
“When my family left Beirut, we left by ferry. I watched the city slowly disappear, a thin stretch of buildings retreating on the horizon getting farther and farther across the sea.”
That image stayed with her for 13 years, inspiring the title of her photo series, Beirut, Recurring Dream. “Years later, I took that photo. It’s in my book,” she says. “It was exactly how I remembered it.”
Private collections and individual visionaries are driving Kazakhstan’s cultural renaissance in the absence of major state investment. I wrote the story for the Observer.
My latest story for Times of Central Asia, is about the inauguration of the Almaty Museum of Arts, which represents a decisive step in shaping Kazakhstan’s art system.
As the country’s first large-scale contemporary art museum, it houses over 700 works collected across three decades, offering a panoramic view of modern Kazakh art while opening pathways to Central Asian and international dialogues.
Interior Forniture and Design Magazine has published my latest article (in Italian with an English translation), a guide to my favourite city, Marseille.
Together, shows staged by the DEO Foundation and Perasma underscore how art can take root in unexpected places, drawing visitors beyond the well-worn circuits of cultural tourism. I wrote the piece for the Observer.
Are we watching or being watched? Ali Cherri’s new show in Marseille, on view through the 4th of January 2026, deconstructs the museum from the inside out. I wrote the article for The Markaz Review.
My review of the show “The Utopia of Rules”, which I saw at the Singapore Art Week at the beginning of the year, has been published in the latest issue of Mekong Review.
New article (originally in Italian, but you also have an English version) about a city which I recently visited, Helsinki. Here is my very personal guide for IFDM.
Another review of the Helsinki Biennial (in Italian with a English translation) for IFDM, sharing some more thoughts and analysis to share on a very interesting art event.
Below the extended version of my latest article which appeared on Le Quotidien de L’Art.
Il y a encore quelques années, la proposition culturelle dans la seconde ville de France en matière d’arts plastiques était extrêmement limitée : quelques lieux informels, des programmations éparses, un public principalement local et un marché de l’art quasi-absent.
Mais, depuis
Manifesta en 2020 et grâce au travail acharné d’espaces créatifs comme la
Friche Belle de Mai, et des muséums tel quel le MUCEM, le [mac] et le Frac, les
propositions se sont faites de plus en plus audacieuses, attirant un public à
la fois national et international. Les galeries indépendantes, plus d’une
vingtaine aujourd’hui, quadrillent le centre-ville dont celles d’artistes qui ont
ouvert leurs ateliers ici à Marseille, après la pandémie.
La vivacité grandissante
de cette scène n’a pas échappée à l’entrepreneur culturelle Becca Hoffman de
l’association 74Arts, qui organise des foires itinérantes, de Aspen à
Singapour. L’Edition marseillaise de 74Arts s’appelle « La Mer, » et
a l’ambition de relier directement les studios d’artistes marseillais aux
grandes galeries françaises ainsi qu’aux collectionneurs internationaux. « On
pense que Marseille a beaucoup changée au cours des dernières années » note
Becca Hoffman, qui vit entre New York et Antibes. « Après le Covid, on a vu
beaucoup de nouvelles fondations et des collectionneurs qui ont déménagés ici.
Marseille, c’est l’avenir. Il y a une énergie créative qui est ouverte à tout
le monde, mais surtout au Méditerranéen. »
There are historical characters that are no longer themselves. They become archetypes and symbols for us to project upon. Cleopatra is one such character.
Drawing on historical sources that retrace who Cleopatra was, the exhibition examines what she has been made to represent — and how her story might now be told differently.
I interviewed the exhibition’s curator for The New Arab.
The 2025 Helsinki Biennial delivers in the sense that it unfolds in the moment and strives for harmony, but do we really want art to affect us so imperceptibly that it’s ultimately like nothing ever happened?
I wrote my review of the Biennial for the Observer.
Naima Morelli is an arts writer and journalist specialized in contemporary art from Asia-Pacific and the MENA region.
She has written for the Financial Times, Al-Jazeera, The Art Newspaper, ArtAsiaPacific, Internazionale and Il Manifesto, among others, and she is a regular contributor to Plural Art Mag, Middle East Monitor and Middle East Eye as well as writing curatorial texts for galleries.
She is the author of three books on Southeast Asian contemporary art.
