Bio

Ayah Babeiti is a Lebanese artist whose work explores themes of urban design, environmental challenges, and economic issues. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach that includes installations, photography, graphic design, and material design, her practice investigates the complex relationships between people, spaces, and resources. Babeiti’s work is deeply rooted in examining the built environment and its impact on communities and individual experiences. She is particularly interested in how urban spaces evolve under socio-economic and environmental pressures, using her art to reveal the stories and dynamics embedded within these landscapes. Through her innovative and thought-provoking creations, Babeiti challenges viewers to reflect on the pressing issues of our time.

Artist Statement

Seasoned with Struggle is a sensory meditation on memory, displacement, and resilience. The work brings together staple ingredients Wheat, Zatar, Sumac, and Parlsey but as vessels of identity and cultural continuity. These ingredients, once abundant in kitchen pantries across Lebanon, now carry the weight of absence and fragility. For Lebanese expats, these elements evoke the kitchen mooneh, a space of nourishment, preservation, and generational care. Yet in the wake of the country’s economic collapse, political unrest, and the devastation of the Beirut Port explosion, even the most basic staples have become increasingly difficult to access within the country.  What was once readily available is now scarce in many regions, revealing deep disparities in food access within a single nation. The table in this work becomes a site for reflection on geography, time, and the shifting availability of essential resources. It draws attention to the uneven ability of communities to sustain culinary traditions that are central to identity and belonging. The loss of a familiar ingredient is not merely practical, it is emotional, symbolic, and deeply felt. Seasoned with Struggle invites viewers to pause, to remember, and to feel the quiet grief that arises when everyday rituals begin to disappear. At the same time, it honors the strength found in preserving culture amid uncertainty, and the enduring role of food in shaping the traditions and shared memories of the Levant coast.