An Opening Breath for the Art Explora Festival & Celebration of Ten Years of TAP
We Breathe, and in Breathing Together, We Resist
Breath is Tide is a four-day program unfolding across Beirut from 22 to 25 May 2025, featuring newly commissioned performances and artworks that take breath as a starting point—both the first and most universal phenomenon of the living. Rooted in the urgencies of our time, the program reflects on breath as a shared force and a form of resistance.
This special edition marks a collaboration between the Art Explora Festival and TAP (Temporary Art Platform )—launching the festival’s opening breath in Lebanon while celebrating ten years of TAP. The Art Explora Festival is a traveling festival offering free artistic and cultural experiences aboard the world’s first museum-boat, exhibition pavilions quayside, and a live programme connecting institutions and communities across 15 Mediterranean countries (2024–2027). Although the museum-boat’s stopover in Beirut has been postponed to 2027 due to the recent war, the program moves forward as “opening breath” for the upcoming stopover of the festival – and an act of solidarity with the local cultural scene.
In a city still navigating the aftermath of war, where the ability to breathe—freely and fully—has been compromised. All events during the four days of “Breath is Tide” are free and accessible to all, creating space for art and culture to gather, imagine, and persist.
About Art Explora Festival
The Art Explora Festival is a traveling festival that sails across the seas and oceans, bringing visitors innovative artistic and cultural experiences free of charge. The festival takes place on board the world’s first museum-boat, quayside in exhibition pavilions, and in various venues of each host city with a programme combining exhibitions, virtual reality, performances, talks, film screenings, and concerts. From spring 2024 to autumn 2027, the festival will travel to 15 countries across the Mediterranean, connecting artists, curators, cultural and non-profit organisations that will collectively imagine a new vision of the Mediterranean.
In Lebanon, Temporary Art Platform (TAP) was selected as the Festival’s local partner. TAP has also curated Undertow, one of the exhibition pavilions showcasing contemporary artists and photographers working with moving image around themes of exile, migration, and the unseen forces shaping the Mediterranean. The exhibition launched in Marseille (June 2024) and has since traveled to Rabat (Morocco) and partially to Durrës (Albania).
Although the Lebanese stopover of the Art Explora Festival’s museum-boat was postponed to 2027 due to the recent war, this special four-day program will still unfold in Beirut as a gesture of solidarity with the local art scene, while also marking TAP’s tenth anniversary.
The program extends across public spaces such as Karantina Public Park and Beirut RiverLESS Forest, and cultural venues including the Beirut Art Center, the Nicolas Sursock Museum, the Lebanese National Library, Metropolis, and Metro Al Madina—places that are, and have long been, our shared breathing spaces in the city. These spaces open up for dialogue and exchange, offering opportunities to pause and reconnect—inviting participants to attune to their own breath and to one another’s through gatherings in nature, collective workouts, concerts, and a dance party.