Marie-Nour Hechaime

Marie-Nour Hechaime (b. 1989) has been working as a curator of contemporary arts at the Sursock Museum in Beirut since July 2020. Previously, she worked for and with several non-profit art institutions in different capacities ranging from curation, coordination, and communication, to fundraising. She is also a member of the self-organized trans-local ecosystem Arts Collaboratory, a commitment that fueled an interest in communing and horizontal governance. In 2017-18, Marie-Nour enrolled in the Master Program in Experimentation Arts & Politics founded by Bruno Latour. The experiences and encounters of that year left a lasting impact on her. Since then, she has been researching and looking at the history of the Levant through an environmental lens, rethinking our relationship with the more-than-human, and probing dominant narratives and ideologies around landscapes, borders, nation-states, and capitalism.

The exhibition she curated last year, ‘Earthly Praxis’, looked at property-in-land in Lebanon, offering critical tools to assess and reinvent it. The three bodies of work on display relied on investigative methodologies and borrowed from the disciplines of law, history, geography, philosophy, and sociology. ‘Sympoietic Fabrics’ is a solo exhibition that calls for a politics of listening to the more-than-humans. It underscores ways of seeing and perceiving –or sensory experiences– that can foster a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of human and non-human, and proposes a ‘sympoiesis’ or making with, through collaborative artistic production.

Furthermore, the upcoming show, “A Comet in Your Eye”, will feature two artists telling stories of ‘cosmo-ecology’ –a term developed by philosopher Vinciane Despret that refers to the need for a renewed mythological spirituality in the Anthropocene. Finally, she is currently editing a publication titled "Flight of the Locust" that regroups contributions from both artists and scholars and looks at the ways territories have been shaped and lived on from an environmental history perspective.

Marie-Nour Hechaime, Curator, Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon, has been awarded by the Getty Foundation, Los Angeles.