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The artist Ghassan Zard presented his solo Exhibition entitled “ALTARS” at Villa Audi, curated and led by Marc Mouarkech.

Across sculpture and painting, Zard stages encounters between matter and image, presence and absence, violence and transcendence. The exhibition brings together new works in brass and pigment that question how memory, trauma, and survival can be held within form.

Zard’s sculptures rise from the ground as if excavated, their surfaces marked by scratches and scars, resembling vessels, frames, or remnants. His paintings, by contrast, expand the horizon inward, transforming sky and sea into unstable territories charged with power, struggle, and imagination.

From this dialogue, the altar emerges, not as a sacred object of devotion but as a temporary architecture, a structure of survival. In Zard’s hands, the altar becomes a place where fragments, gestures, and wounds gather into constellations of resistance and reflection.
Installed within the mosaic-covered halls of Villa Audi, the works resonate with the museum’s dense patterns and layered histories, creating altars not to gods but to endurance, not to transcendence but to the fragile act of continuing.

For Zard, “This work is about reaching for something absolute, almost a mystical search that leads into silence. On the way, what begins gently hardens under the weight of accumulated crises and violence. It moves back and forth between calm and the world’s madness and fury”

The exhibition unfolds through three altars, each borrowing a distinct ontological form:
-  Veins of Ascent turn upward, staging verticality as both resistance and contemplation.
- Cartographies of the In-Between opens a passage between charged points, where movement itself becomes ritual and the trees stand as pilgrims of transition.
- The Bells After the Fire stretches horizontally to evoke fire as both devastation and revelation.

Together, they trace a topology of being: vertical, liminal, and horizontal, proposing not resolution but ways of dwelling with fracture, memory, transformation, and the possibility of imagining otherwise.

This exhibition also celebrates a significant milestone: the donation of a new work by Ghassan Zard to the permanent garden collection of Villa Audi. The sculpture will join other landmark pieces on site, strengthening the dialogue between contemporary creation and the museum’s heritage. This donation ensures that Zard’s vision becomes part of the Villa’s living memory, accessible to the public and future generations.

The exhibition was in collaboration with Galerie Tanit and Fondation Audi.