Ismat Mahmassani

Ismat Mahmassani is a Lebanese artist who was born in Beirut in 1974. She lived abroad her entire life, spending time in Saudi Arabia, London, Paris and Dubai, before returning to Lebanon in 2018.

Mahmassani studied Law in the UK, specialising in Human Rights, but rekindled her love for photography in recent years, spurred on by a passion for digital content creation.

It was while walking around Beirut with her Nikon when first back that Mahmassani first began taking photos of her surroundings. She found herself drawn to crumbling, dilapidated buildings, derelict houses and forgotten hidden treasures that are hallmarks of the cityscape, which she put down in part to a love for street photography and the influence of her father, an architect.

Having developed the images, she was struck by the poignancy of the scenes she’d captured, from the emptiness of the buildings to their unkempt facades and the sense of lost grandeur. “The idea came to me that I could breathe new life into these abandoned places with some beauty and colour from the natural world,” she explained in an interview with Artscoops.

Mahmassani’s work focuses on digital overlay. In her art, she introduces digital additions taken from real images, usually from the world of nature. Pretty, colourful flowers from the Lebanese countryside or greenery reinvigorate desolate, once statuesque houses or neglected places of architectural significance. Bullet holes are filled with pink petals and foliage bedecks a rusted balcony, while green buds are added to the bare branches of a tree. 

The themes Mahmassani chooses to explore are often centred on hope and healing, as was evident in her first solo show, titled ‘Revive with Bloom’, held in both Dubai and London in 2022. Mahmassani followed this up with ‘Revive with Bloom Part 2’, a solo exhibition in Beirut held at Iwan Maktabi (end 2022/early 2023). Mahmassani has also taken part in group shows, including Artscoops’ ‘Emerging from the Chaos’ exhibition, held in 2022.